#beautified

That’s an excellent question actually. No one really knows why Polonius dislikes ‘beautified’, given that the phrase is not generally treated as problematic in other early modern texts. Shakespeare himself uses it pretty straightforwardly in The Two Gentlemen of Verona when an outlaw tells Valentine ‘you are beautified / With goodly shape’ (4.1.54-55), and in a slightly different form when Lady Capulet compares Paris to a book and tells Juliet ‘this unbound lover, / To beautify him, only lacks a cover’ (Romeo and Juliet 1.3.88-89). The Arden edition notes G. R. Hibbard’s guess that what Polonius objects to is the suggestion that Ophelia is not ‘beautiful’ but ‘beautified’, and therefore that her beauty is the effect of cosmetics rather than natural. It’s true that Q1 has the simpler ‘to the beautiful Ofelia’ (7.75), and Shakespeare does suggest ‘beautify’ as something that changes appearances in phrases such as Lady Capulet’s, or in Tamora’s complaint that she and her sons are being paraded in as prisoners: ‘we are brought to Rome, / To beautify thy triumphs’ (Titus Andronicus 1.1.112-13). The idea that ‘beautify’ suggests preening is also present in Pericles’ promise to cut his beard for his daughter’s marriage:

And now this ornamentMakes me look dismal will I clip to form,And what this fourteen years no razor touchedTo grace thy marriage day I’ll beautify. (Pericles 5.3.74-77)

So again, the suggestion is to prettify something not inherently beautiful. Some scholars even suggest that it recalls Greene’s famous disparagement of Shakespeare as ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’. 

In other words, 'beautify’ can be used quite straightforwardly and inoffensively. Still, to a sensitive father or in particular situations it may contain a barb, and perhaps, given Hamlet’s later tirade about women ‘God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another’ (3.1.142-43), Polonius isn’t entirely wrong to have a problem with ‘beautified’.