BEAUTY UNASSISTED.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 463, 23 March 1909, Page 3

BEAUTY UNASSISTED.

,To the average mail or woman it is ap- f parent that ■ Naturo has very bad taste at 1 times (says a writer in the "Queen"). I Nature wants to grow flowers of two a colours, crudest, rawest yellow and magenta, J pure and simple. This is only by way of J illustration. Take Nature in tho human appearance. She is convinced that she prefers j hair the colour of a potato. She is not to { be argued out of it. Point to her the beautics of auburn, golden, ebon-black hair. | "i'ooh!" she says, "those are only for the sake of variety. You call me Dame Nature, j Mother Nature—l'm a _ female, and I like j a -change now and again. But give me a j good-wearing colour like potato-brown 1" So , she gives it us. . ' • And straight hair! Fashion or no fashion j —and 1 am fully, aware that waves are not , in the first flight of Fashion's affections just j now—wavy hair is more becoming to. a woman's face than quite straight in ninetynine cases out of a hundred. Yet I suppose j not one woman in a thousand has real, naturally wavy hair. And Naturo likes a shiny nose! Not Venus herself would look : better with a shiny nose than a—what shall I say?—a mat-surfaced one! ; I suppose it i 3 natural to stoop? I be- ; liovo our ancestors labelled "probably arboreal" stooped dreadfully. But stooping : is so unbecoming. And if. you run about ] without shoes you spoil the shape of your feet nearly as badly as if you had worn illfitting,. boots. /. . 1 Nothing can be more beautiful, you say, than an absolutely lovely, natural woman—a woman with perfect skin and hair, features and figure, a woman for whom Nature has done everything at her very best. By all -means. I do not disagree; indeed, I agree most enthusiastically. But how often do you find her? Once in a million times, perhaps I We are average, you see, as a rule. \Ve want our hair, even if abundant, to be well kept; we want the right shoes, the right clothcs; we want our possibly natural teeth carefully preserved and kept clean; tho same with our skin; we want to be taught to walk and dance and hold ourselves properly, to wear the right boots, the right clothes; wo want our colour instinct and our general taste trained; we want to be taught in youth not to talk through our noses or out of our boots, not to laugh too loud or -in an unfortunately acquired manner; we want to bo taught to take care of our nails—the nail left to Naturo does Naturo but scant justice! In short, we rejuire' civilisation whero our appearances are concerned if we arc ever to bo fit to look at. No, beauty unadorned is very seldom beauty at all, and that -is tho truth. If the scrupulously "natural" woman—the woman who looks on powder as tho plaguo and rouge as a red rag, who scorns tho slightest ripple in her hair, who objects to a polished nail or a high instep, who is proud of a 30-inch waist (I have met her), who glories in a shiny nose, were only the woman who spends hours brushing her hair, who really cleanses her skin—not sluices it with hard, cold water and scarifies it with a rough towel—who wears beautifully cut boots, not horrors whose only recommendation is that they are waterproof, who goes in for the silhouette of her figuro rather than the measurement of an individual circumference!—if only she were!—but sho is not. Oh, tho neglected hair and nails, the ,slumsy walk, the slouching carriage, the greasy skin, tlie abominable cheap stays, and villainous underwear—how they bespeak a neglected, not a natural body, and where is the beauty? There is no'beauty in the simple abstinence from all sorts of aids to! good looks. 1 am sorry to put it thus brutally, but how many of my readers think - there is? "I am as Nature made mel" proudly said ono of these ladies to me quite a short, time i ago. "Oh, don't say that!" I replied—an answer which might be taken in moro than ono way, and I observed her looking doubtfully at mo at intorvals for the rest of tho afternoon.