COSTLY WOMANLY BEAUTY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18552, 26 April 1930, Page 13 (Supplement)

COSTLY WOMANLY BEAUTY

VANITY OF EVE’S DAUGHTERS. American women spend at least C 400,000.000 a year in trying to improve on the beauty with which Nature may be said to have endowed them. In a recent article in the Outlook it is suggested that ambitious youth in search of a profitable career might consider the high art of the beautician or cosmetologist, and thus cut in on a share of the money that the American woman spends each year for creams, lotions, massages, and permanent waves. The average American woman lias 16 square feet of skin. Her dissatisfaction with it—or at least with that portion she exposes to the public gaze accounts for this ernomous cosmetics bill, which is in excess of the amount spent for millinery, dresses, and jewellery over the same period. Moreover, it surpasses the total budgets of half a dozen States. It represents more than 1000 times the sum spent by the Government on gun powder and ammunition in a peace-time year. And when educationists begin to compare the costs of beauty with the costs of education they weep publicspirited tears and call on heaven to witness the wretched vantiy of Eve’s daughters. Thirty million women—the other thirty million are either too young or too old to want to be beautiful—spent this sum annually. With so much money available the hairdressers, massuers, cosmeticians, beauty specialists, cosmetologists, beauticians, coiffeurs, manicurists, and just plain barbers have their jobs cut out for them. With thirty million faces to massage, thirty million heads of hair to wash, wave, and trim, and 300 million finger nails to shape and polish, toil is ahead—but so are profits! The industry is organising for inevitable growth. In one year, we learn, American women use 4000 tons of powder and enough lip-sticks to reach from Chicago to Los Angeles by way of San Francisco. Likewise there are consumed 52,500 tons of cleansing cream, 26,250 tons of skin lotion, 19,109 tons of complexion soap, 17,500 tons of nourishing cream, 8750 tons of foundation cream,6s62 tons of bath powder, and 2375 tons of rouge. Let no one think that this urge for beauty is merely a concomitant of the modem era of woman’s freedom. Archaeoligists excavating the ancient Sumerian city of Kish, possibly the world’s first civilisation so far unearthed, found elaborate evidence that the women rouged, beaded their eyelashes, manicured their fingers, and wore ornamental coffures. It must be admitted, however, that never before in American civilisation have the women had as much money to spend as they have to-day, and accordingly they are the better able to invest some of their earnings in the beauty shops. For office workers this is due not only to a natural feminine pride, but to the realisation that youth, or the appearance of it, is a distinct asset, and that the grime and dirt encountered in this man’s world is not designed to enhance the beauty of that schoolgirl complexion.