NO BEAUTIFUL WOMEN

Opunake Times, 19 January 1934, Page 4

NO BEAUTIFUL WOMEN

SAYS ENGLISH NOVELIST I wonder how many readers will concur in the sentiments oi Gilbert Frankau, the British novelist, who says there are no beautiful women! This is what he

tbinks about us: "The more I examine present-day womanhood the more I am disappointed in my search after the ideal beauty which is the romantic novelist's dream. Pretty little faces, attractive little faces, clevei little faces and, above all, hard little faces, I see by the score. Wherever I go the girls are better turned out than they used to be when I was young-. They take more care of their hands, their hair, their health and their figures. The standard has improved. Yet to me —perhaps I am not as young as I was —it seems a mass production standard. There is something artificial about it. The faces and the figures run to types and not to individualities. Hollywood, in the pre-talkie epoch, was no exception to this. I felt, with fifty stars dancing before me, that I was in a beauty parlour, rather than in a parlour of beauties—if you understand what I mean. The fashionable London dancing or dining clubs of to-day give me a precisely similar impression. It is difficult to pick holes in any woman there. Young or old, they have all made the best of themselves. But where s the superlative best? Wheie is the 'reigning beauty'? Where is the 'Toast of the Town'? The younger generation, at least, among those who have money, prodtices no outstanding rose. Our debutantes are mere Darwin tulips, decorative only in the mass."