COSMETICS TAX

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 136, 10 June 1937, Page 19

COSMETICS TAX

SOURCE OF REVENUE

ENGLISH WRITER'S ATTACK

Proposals in England for a tax on cosmetics are notable by reason of their lateness, states a writer in the "Manchester Guardian." When every woman in every bus or every tram takes the opportunity for repairing any damage to her make-up; when millions of lips are other than their natural red; when hairdressers and manicurists are booming as never before; and when a great deal of money is to be demanded of a long-suffering nation—then it "would seem that a nonproductive industry might be called upon to help meet the bill.

Most people think of make-up as concerning rouge, powder, and lipstick alone. Most people think of hairdressing as consisting permanently of permanent waves. But this is only the surface view of the trade in cosmetics and in all that with which they are associated. Millions of words are written every day concerning the exact kind of complexion it behoves the fashionable woman—and are we not all fashionable today?—to wear at given hours of the day. She can change her rouge almost hourly, and with it her powder and lipstick. She can put on more .or less black on the eyebrows or under the eyes, according to the occasion. And for the means by which these transformations take place there are innumerable charming little boxes, business-like looking tins, containers, the price of which even exceeds that of the special complexion aids. EYEBROWS AND "LASHES. Further, the necessary shaving of the eyebrows of film-stars to prevent shadows has involved the shaving of the eyebrows of everyone and the replacing of them by a literally pencilled line which may reach as far as the hair, according to the expression desired. And if the eyebrows are shaved off to avoid anything so barbarous as nature, eye-lashes are now being put on, each being stuck separately, so that the fashionable woman can vie with any doll or any chocolate-box portrait with the length of her eyelashes. It is true that washing becomes an indulgence to be avoided and that the pillow is strewn with eyelashes every morning, until at the end of a fortnight t all has to be.done over again. But no matter. Eyelashes alone at the moment would probably bring in a handsome tax.

Nails also are not simply manicured, as of old. They are painted different colours for each event of the day. Sports dress takes one type of nail; silver or gold is not out of the way;

blood red represents the passion which it is desirable to suggest towards dinnertime. And, as most people have ten fingers, there may be some forty different paintings to do in a day, or 280 dabs of varnish or colour, or both, used in a week.

"A LASTING PREOCCUPATION."

Hair is a lasting preoccupation. It has to fit different hats, as regards both cut and colour. Colouring is preferably anything but one's own. Hair may be lacquered into place; it may even be worked upon to simulate nature. Whatever is done to it two or three times a day, it takes special unguents to produce the effect, and little expensive bottles of these might well produce a handsome tax result.

It is not as though taxation would, bring about the cessation of every kind of make-up. Nature would not come into its own as easily as that, and most people.feel beautiful in proportion as they have expended their substance on cosmetics. Also cosmetics are the hope of a large ' proportion of the world. Most of us do not really think as well of our looks as all that, and in cosmetics is the panacea which some day in the distant future , may turn us out as beauties and in the long meantime at least make us look as much as possible like the rest of the herd..