Making The Best Of Your Looks

Southland Times, Issue 23538, 18 June 1938, Page 17

Making The Best Of Your Looks

By

Margaret Lindsay

I’d like to address my beauty hints especially to young girls in their teens. For they are the ones who are now laying the foundation of future beauty—and if those foundations are spoiled, there may be no future beauty. One of the things I believe every young girl in her teens should avoid like the plague is—plucking her eyebrows!

“Pooh!” I can hear her saying as she reads this—“she’s a fine one to talk! Don’t all movie actresses do it?”

My answer is: No, they don’t! Eyebrow plucking is definitely on the decline, in Hollywood. I know many girls now—Jean Muir, June Travis, Janet Gaynor—who don’t pluck theirs at all. Perc Westmofe, the make-up artist, says that within two years, nobody will be doing it. And the trouble with youngsters is that they always do it too enthusiastically! Instead, I’d like to tell the girls that if they brush their brows faithfully every night, they can train them into a natural line, so that by the time they are twenty, it will never be necessary to pluck them at all. The same is true of eyelashes. Mascara, too generously applied, gives any girl a hard, coarse look. It should never, never, be used on the lower lashes at all. The best thing to use is a cream mascara that makes them glisten and gives just a subtle darkening of colour. Then they should be brushed upward at night, making them curl and stimulating their growth. In this way, they can be improved tremendously in a very short time.

I am also a firm believer in soap and water for the face. But before using it, I always take a tube of colourless petroleum jelly or white vaseline, and rub some of it carefully into my eyelashes and eyebrows. This keeps them softened, and prevents the soap from reaching in, which in time would result in a dryness and falling out of the brows and lashes. Then after my skin is dried with a soft towel, it is but the work of a moment to remove the vaseline with a piece of cleaning tissue. Finally—if I don’t have a good deep tan on my face long before the first of June every year, it isn’t the sun’s fault—or mine either. I assist the sun’s rays with a special preparation of my own, which I rub into my skin before going out of doors, and also two or three times during the sun bath. It consists of three drops of iodine mixed with equal parts of oil and vinegar, shaken well and applied evenly. This assures the skin of a nice golden brown, and protects it from becoming leathery or burned.

OU and sunlight, I believe, are the two greatest beauty aids of. all.