WOMEN AND BEAUTY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19801, 17 May 1934, Page 12

WOMEN AND BEAUTY

A RISING STANDARD Why are women growing more beautiful? A more refined and varied life has something to do with the general tendency. Besides, women are learning how to improve average good looks, and how to preserve beauty and develop it as a photographic plate develops under the acid, states an overseas writer. Exercise, proper food—and not too much of it—a regular and varied life, methodical and scientific grooming, in which you may include such “beautifying” processes as massage, and the attention of the hairdresser and manicurist; these are factors which make for beauty and develop it. When women slack off, get lazy, | greedy for sweets and rich pastries, im- , patient of self-control, the discipline of mind and body, they lose very swiftly whatever measures of good looks a bountiful Mother Nature has bestowed on them. One of the unsung tragedies of modern life is the decay of that fresh, eager, pretty girl of 21 into the shapeless, apathetic, dull woman of 40—a poppy gone to seed. The women of to-day are often attacked for their short hair and their boyish figures; they are attacked for their free manners, slangy speech and cocktail and cigarette propensities. But they look to me infinitely better looking and incomparably more sensibly dressed than the women of any other age back to the old Greeks. The general standard of beauty Is enormously higher than it ever was before, and for every one beautiful woman of yesterday there are a thousand to-day. In such a reservoir of beauty as Hollywood, indeed, there are so many really flawless beauties that beauty becomes commonplace and among the lowest-valued of human commodities. The truth is that our whole trend is upwards. We are bigger than the armoured knights and their ladies, and in due course we shall complete the cycle and end wdiere Greece was. at a beauty which will fire the world lor another two thousand years.