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OneKitly

cosmetics

nounnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//kɒzˈmɛt.ɪks//
  • Canada//kɑzˈmɛt.ɪks//
  • Canada/[kɑzˈmɛɾ.ɪks]/
  • Australia//kɔzˈmet.ɪks//
  • Australia/[kɔzˈmeɾ.ɪks]/

Preparations applied externally to change or enhance the beauty of skin, hair, nails, lips, and eyes.

noun

  1. 1

    Preparations applied externally to change or enhance the beauty of skin, hair, nails, lips, and eyes.

    Near-synonyms: makeup, make-up; beauty products

  2. 2

    The way something looks; superficial appearance.

    Near-synonym: cosmesis

    In the great fishbowl that we're doing everything in it's kind of unfortunate, but the cosmetics of the thing are more important than what's accomplished — in a great many ways.

Etymology

From French cosmétique, from Ancient Greek κοσμητική (kosmētikḗ, “the art of dress and ornament”), from κοσμητικός (kosmētikós), an adjective of κοσμέω (kosméō, “to order, to arrange, to rule, to adorn, to equip, to dress, to embellish”).

noun

  1. 1

    The study of such products.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).