BEAUTY COUNTS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6944, 25 June 1929, Page 11

BEAUTY COUNTS

DOCTORS AND JUDGES. England has started a new sort of beauty contest. It is basod on the notion that beauty is health. No woman can be considered beautiful, the sponsors of tho new type of competition declare, who is not also healthy. A great many winners of beauty contests, although they might pass triumphantly before a committee of artists, would fail miserably before a committee of doctors. It is pointed out that baby contests are held along the principle of physical perfection rather than physical charm. The new beauty contests arc, in fact, very much like baby contests.

The British magazine, Health and Strength sponsored the first of tho physical culture beauty contests. It was held at the National Sporting Club and tkero were two sets of judges.. One committee was composed of physicians, who examined the contestants from the point of view of mere physical perfection. Tests were made of the heart, lungs, eyes, nose, and throat. Beautiful girls with attractive retrousse noses were turned down because they did not breathe properly through their noses. Candidates who would have no difli culty in passing before a battery of lorgnettes ran up against trouble before the stethoscope. Over four hundred girls were entered in the contest) many of them trained athletes, expert in tennis, horseback riding, track running, and other sports. Yet by the time the committee of judges wero through with them, over half had been disqualified for one physical defect or another. The remaining young women were ready now for a second trial. Tho judges this time were experts in “graco and deportment.” Without regard for facial beauty, they judged the girls from the point "of view of carriage, dancing ability, litheness, and general grace. Less than a hundred girls survived the second judgment. The survivors were then paraded before a committee of sculptors and artists, tho chairman of which was Mr. Eric Gill, the sculptor. It was the responsibility of this third group of judges to consider tho. remaining girls purely from, tho viewpoint of aesthetic beauty. They were unable to select any one girl as standing out among those they judged, and finally selected three young women who were pronounced perfect from tho point of view of beauty, grace, and physical perfection. But the sponsors of the contest were determined to select one from among these three, and inasmuch as tho judges had been unable to make a selection, another judge was appointed, whose duty it was to make a selection from among tho three. Albert Toft, the sculptor, received the difficult assignment. After a great deal of difficulty, he finally named one of the girls as the most beautiful as well as the most perfect of the more than 40<> who had originally entered the competition. The winner was Miss Ellen Mackenzie, of London.