What Makes A Pretty Girl

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31582, 20 January 1968, Page 5

What Makes A Pretty Girl

(By

DAVID GUNSTON)

In these days of beauty queens and beauty salons, have we debased the coinage of feminine beauty? Certainly today’s notion of beauty seems to start and end with face and figure, when clearly there’s a lot more to it than that. Take, for instance, this traditional catalogue of womanly beauty, drawn up centuries ago by male connoisseurs of the Latin races, and see how well it fits: Three things white: The skin, the teeth and the hands. Three black: The eyes, the eyebrows, and the eyelashes. Three red: The lips, the cheeks and the nails. Three short: The teeth, the ears and the feet. Three long: The torso, the hands and the hair. Three wide: The chest, the forehead and the space between the eyebrows. Three narrow: The mouth, the waist and the ankles. Three thick: The arms, the thighs and the calves. Three delicate: The fingers, the hair and the lips. Three small: The breasts, the nose and the head. Of course, if you want to pursue the thing further, it’s worth studying another ancient list This, according to Indian legend, is what the gods took when they created the first woman.

First, they took the basic ingredients— The cold of the snow on the mountain peaks.

The heat of the furnace in the heart of a volcano. The hardness of a diamond. The cruelty of a tiger. Then they tempered these with: The gaiety of a sunbeam. The soft velvet of a rose petal. The playfulness of a feather in the wind. The timidity of a hare. The gaze of a deer. Then they added: The soft curves of the moon. The graceful lines of a vine. The suppleness of a snake. The fickleness of the winds. The vanity of a peacock. The cooing of a dove. The talkativeness of a parrot. What, no monkeys, you may ask? Ancient poppycock? Perhaps—but what makes you. think women are any different today from what they have always been? Anyway, it’s a nice thought that the legend ends by telling us that when the gods completed their great task they stood back to admire what they had created and were well pleased. So beauty is not entirely in the eye of the beholder, nor is it only skin deep. The really beautiful woman always has a serene inner radiance that has nothing to do with her age or her makeup kit. The rest can, on occasion, reach towards that ideal under the stimulus of what appeals. “Show a woman a picture of a baby and the size of her pupils will increase by about a fifth,” says Professor John

Cohen, Manchester University’s leading psychologist. “Show a woman a picture of a baby together with its mother and her pupils will increase still more, by about a quarter of their natural size.” And she’ll exhibit a kind of beauty, the true kind, for it comes from within.

We all- know the special kind of beauty visible in the face of a mother, in reality or to-be. The trouble so often is that women just don’t get the kind of emotional stimulus they need to develop their reserves of inner beauty. Our grandfathers understood this better when they used to declare: “A little love and good company improves a woman.”

J. B. Priestley hit the point exactly when he said of a woman: “She was not pretty, but she might have been handsome if somebody had kept telling her that she was pretty.”