SHINGLE HATS AND HEALTH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19764, 11 October 1927, Page 5

SHINGLE HATS AND HEALTH

* I BY A HARLEY STBEET DOCTOB. Spring has brought with har Fashion's decree, the tight-fitting shingle hat, and rumours are abroad that the extreme kind is responsible for headache, so constricting are its confining lines. More, baldness has been mentioned! If this is so then this aid to beauty (for 1 that is what a hat should be in addition to a protection) defeats its own ends. No one could look their best suffering from a headache, and incipient baldness could not be accounted a fortunate end. Eve is therefore confronted with two undesirable facts which ultimately make neither for health nor beauty. The present-day search for health by admonitions regarding right and beneficial dressing, diet and exercise, has carried all before it, as far as the figure is concerned. Shingled heads-are more hygienic, we are told. Mora's the pity that the fashionable headgear should Strike an unhygienic note! Health demands that, in the dressing of figure or head, the wearer is as unconscious of them as of the respiratory function or the heart-beats. At all times sensations stream up to consciousness from every portion of the body, and anyone who wants to think about them, or any particular part of them, .can make them sources of considerable discomfort by concentration of attention. In this way tight hats predispose to these localised disturbances and concentrate the attention of the head. Moreover, a constriction about the head produces not only headache but a feeling of discomfort, The unnecessary pressure becomes tiresome, makes one irritable, and the face assumes an anxious expression. It seems that tight hats may be as pernicious as tight waists used to be. After all, it is well known that th» emotional disturbances caused by the pinpricks of the make-up of life are wreckers of health and good looks. Tight hats play their part in this. They may be responsible for the worry habit or the hurry habit, and so predispose not to healthy and happiness but to neurotic manifestations, which destroy the harmony of one's being. Madame La Mode cannot be denounced, but fashionable headgear should be combined with comfort and so conduce to health, wherein lies the seeds of beauty.