Rather than using the dactylic hexameters of Hesiod and Vergil, Ovid casts his advice in elegiac couplets, the traditional meter of love poetry. Ovid, writing a generation later for an audience to whom the Georgics were well known, used Vergil's sober language to instruct girls on 'what care can enhance your looks, and how your beauty may be preserved'. Centuries later in 29 BC, the Roman poet Vergil, writing in Latin while taking his inspiration in part from Hesiod, published the Georgics, a work whose ostensible purpose was to provide advice on agriculture. In the earliest known example of didactic poetry, Works and Days, the Greek poet Hesiod admonishes a dissolute brother to lead a life of honest labor. This poetic genre, perfected by Ovid in his Ars Amatoria, was a curious amalgam of the moralizing and pedagogical tone of didactic poetry and the frivolous subject matter common to Latin elegiac.

The poem is Ovid's first attempt at didactic elegy.

The first section is an elaborate introduction in which Ovid introduces and defends his subject matter the second comprises five recipes for cosmetic treatments which include common ingredients and precise measurements. These fall neatly into sections, each exactly fifty lines long. Only one hundred of an estimated five to eight hundred original lines survive. The Medicamina must then predate the third book of Ars Amatoria, a work whose composition has been variously placed between 1 BC and AD 8, the year of Ovid's exile. The title and approximate date of the poem are known from a brief mention in another of Ovid's works, Ars Amatoria, in the third book of which the poet states that he has already written 'a small work, a little book' on medicamina, or cosmetics. Other writers at the time condemned women's usage of cosmetics. In the hundred extant verses, Ovid defends the use of cosmetics by Roman women and provides five recipes for facial treatments.

Medicamina Faciei Femineae ( Cosmetics for the Female Face, also known as The Art of Beauty) is a didactic poem written in elegiac couplets by the Roman poet Ovid.

Amphorae, scented body oil, perfume bottles ( unguentarium), rose petals and a figurine, all from Ancient Rome.

Amores ovid