WOMAN’S WORLD.

Wairarapa Age, 1 August 1936, Page 2

WOMAN’S WORLD.

PERSONAL ITEMS. Mr. and Mrs. Hassell, Feilding, are staying with Mr. and Mrs. G. Groves, Bushgrove. Mrs. Raymond Lee, Hawke’s Bay, is visiting Masterton. Miss Nancy Twistleton, Levin, is staying with Mrs. lan Speedy, Flag Creek, Tinui. Miss W. Miller, Napier, is the guest of Mrs. C. J. AYilliams, Pownall Street. Miss D. Nicholls, Wellington, has been spending a few days with her sister, Mrs. C. Monro, Totara Street. Miss Kennedy, Wellington, has been staying with Mrs. J. Kennedy, Opaki Road. Mrs. D. Brunton, Dryer’s Rock, will be spending the week-end with her mother, Mrs. Ross, Rimu Street. The Misses Dakin, First Street, are visiting Levin. Miss Gordon, Gladstone, is spending the week-end in Palmerston North. Miss May Chamberlain, Gisborne, was a visitor to Masterton this week. FASHION SPECTRUM. LAW THAT GOVERNS COLOURS. Science has been making some strange discoveries about colour. Fashion colours it seems are not, as we supposed, the choice, season after season, of the mythical group called Fashion Kings. They are but part of a great general colour rhythm, and follow the rainbow hues of the spectrum.

Every eleven years, unless for some definite reason it has been diverted, the predominant colour travels the length of the spectrum from the red to the violet end. Every following eleven years it makes the return journey.

This rather remarkable fact was first brought to light by Professor Alfred Barker while concerned as Professor of Textile Industries in Leeds University with another investigation. «An iron law governs this colour “appetite” in women; fashion “dictators” have to satisfy it. Another interesting fact brought to light by Professor Barker concerns the universal reaction of the human sense of colour hunger from an excess of any one colour. When for some reason or other (such as the rage for bottlegreen in 1874) people become utterly weary of one colour they go to its complementary. For example, after the war, when, most men had been having rather more than they liked of khaki, the demand in civilian suits was almost entirely for blue. And blue is the complementary colour of yellow. That was what Professor Barker calls the *' unconscious colour response.”

What is true of the dominant colour in any season is true also of colour ranges. There is the dominant colour and, after it, the constituents of that colour chord. The vivid colours of a summer fashion are nearly always followed in the succeeding spring by more subtle variants of the same colours.

This rhythm of colour that makes fashion run up and down the chromatic scale is modified by exceptional circumstances. For example, when Queen Victoria went into what was practically perpetual mourning, that fact resulted in the general drabness of Victorian fashions. So, too, in ages when leaders of fashion have favoured vivid or audacious colour schemes, their example has deflected the colour scale and resulted in a prolonged variation on a single colour theme. Influences such as that of the Chinese Exhibition had the same result. A KNITTING HINT. Isn’t it a nuisance when the ball of wool ends at an important place in your knitting! This is a good way to join a new ball of wool on to the old one. Thread the end of the wool you are using into a darning needle, and then “darn” this into the new wool at the beginning of the ball. Run it in for 6in. or more, and you will have a firm, invisible join. GLASS TELEPHONES. THE NEWEST TRANSPARENCY. Transparent telephones, wireless cabinets, spectacle frames, lampshades, clock-cases, boxes for beauty preparations and a hundred and one other things are now being made of a new transparent resin which is being produced in England from coal. Its weight is one-third of that of glass and it is much stronger. It is being used a good deal in aeroplanes.

It can be moulded, it can be latheturned like wood, and it can be fused. Its possibilities are unlimited, though it is more easily scratched than glass, but easily polished with njetal polish. By colouring it, richer colours than have yet been possible with plastic materials can be obtained and, for the first time, it is possible to make telephones to stand up to central-heating and sharp fluctuations in temperature, as in the tropics. Use of the new resin in fountain pens, enables the amount of ink in the pen to be seen at a glance.