"I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever"
About this Quote
A velvet-gloved shiv of a compliment: Loos flatters “American gentlemen” only long enough to expose what she’s really measuring them by. The line sets up a neat trade: the old-world flourish of hand-kissing (polite, intimate, empty) versus the hard permanence of jewelry (material, transactional, undeniably useful). It’s a joke with teeth because it sounds like romantic praise while quietly converting romance into a ledger.
The subtext isn’t that women are shallow; it’s that the culture has already made intimacy fungible. A kiss is sensation; a bracelet is security. Loos understands how “gentleman” can be a brand identity that masks a market reality: the performance of devotion matters less than what devotion buys. The phrasing “may make you feel very good” is devastatingly airy, as if emotion were a minor side effect. “Lasts forever” lands like an ad slogan, borrowing the language of permanence to sanctify consumption.
Context sharpens it. Loos, best known for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, built her satire around the 1920s American boom, where class aspiration, consumer goods, and sexual politics collided. Her heroines were often dismissed as ditzy, but the humor is that they’re the clearest-eyed economists in the room. This line skewers a culture that congratulates itself on chivalry while communicating in cash. It’s not romance versus greed; it’s romance revealed as another form of currency, only less reliable than sapphires.
The subtext isn’t that women are shallow; it’s that the culture has already made intimacy fungible. A kiss is sensation; a bracelet is security. Loos understands how “gentleman” can be a brand identity that masks a market reality: the performance of devotion matters less than what devotion buys. The phrasing “may make you feel very good” is devastatingly airy, as if emotion were a minor side effect. “Lasts forever” lands like an ad slogan, borrowing the language of permanence to sanctify consumption.
Context sharpens it. Loos, best known for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, built her satire around the 1920s American boom, where class aspiration, consumer goods, and sexual politics collided. Her heroines were often dismissed as ditzy, but the humor is that they’re the clearest-eyed economists in the room. This line skewers a culture that congratulates itself on chivalry while communicating in cash. It’s not romance versus greed; it’s romance revealed as another form of currency, only less reliable than sapphires.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Anita Loos — commonly cited from the novel 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' (1925), spoken by the character Lorelei Lee. |
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