PAINTED FACES.

Press, Volume LVI, Issue 16725, 7 January 1920, Page 2

PAINTED FACES.

WHITER. ON AUSTRALIAN WOMEN. | (from on ows connEsroN'DF.NT.) SYDNEY, December 31. A writer in ono of the Melbourne papers, speaking about the painted fnccs and rouged lips of Australian women, declares tho scores of Mel- j l>ourne women are lineal descendants of j Jezebel. A famous artist once advised I husbands to castigate their wives if tl.ey ! painted their faces. If the advico were! followed, the great bulk of the women of Melbourne and Sydney, to mention only two of the States, would be under tho lash. To paint their faces is sometning of a fetish with Australian women. Many of them do not even do it artistically." At closc range it sometimes looks as though il had been applied with the slapdash ferocity of the man who paints a house fence. And they all do it —flappers and mothers alike. It is no nncommon thing either to seo women smoking cigarettes in public places. "Some Australian women,'' says the Melbourne writer, "seem likely to bring upon all Australian women the reputation of being painted dolls . . . On Melbourne's most fashionable parade there are faces to which paint seems to havo been applied with a thumb nail or a trowel; there are faces which create the impression that the owners are members of some picrrot troupe who havo come into town hurriedly, having forgotten to wash their jxiint and powder off. That tliev believe the paint to be unseen is a triumph of their imagination rather than ol' their art. . . . There was a day when a blushing girl was a pretty sight. To-day. she cannot show tho crimson blush because of tho crimson paint. The whole tiling is pitiable. Doctors denounco it. Nature avenges it." And what is said of women in Melbourne is unfortunately tmo in some respects of their sisters in Sydney. It is difficult to understand, for without these artifices the Australian women as a class are as attractive as their sex in any part of tho world.