Dedicated to all Yang Gui Feis without B.O.

When I was in Shanghai last December, my tourguide amused us with the rumour that Yang Gui Fei had a very seriour case of body odour. It was so pungent that she had to take lots of bath everday with flower petals scattered in the spring pool that Emperor Xuan Zong specially built for her. However, this act of musking her smell was also ironically used to glorify her love for hygiene and her beauty as some described her body to be as smooth as jade after the bath.
Without much introduction, Yang was also popular for being extremely beautiful but plump. It should not be surprising since the average courses of a meal that court concubines took at that time is 58. But when compared to the maximum of 1580 calories that women nowadays allow themselves to eat, it is a major shocker. I guess it is every modern women's fantasy to be real thin so that admittedly we will look better in super small sized clothes and gormandize without looking too ugly. This results in many plump women adopting extreme measures such as taking harmful slimming pills or starvation to lose weight. I feel that even though one may indeed become slimmer after attempting different solutions other than exercising and maintaining a healthy diet, she may suffer severe side effects in the future. For example, I saw this girl who lost a patch of her hair after starving herself to lose weight on a TV programme the other day. Although it is difficult to convince modern women that plump is beautiful as Yang Gui Fei is the role model more than 1000 years ago, it is not worth sacrificing our health for something as subjective as beauty.
However, women are irrational especially in the vanity aspect and just like what some say, "a woman's lifelong career is to lose weight". I will say that this is a job more stressful than being a teacher, less rewarding than being a researcher but definitely better off than being one's concubine.