PAINTED FACES.

Hokitika Guardian, 10 January 1920, Page 4

PAINTED FACES.

WRITER ON AUSTRALIAN WOMEN SYDNEY, Dec. 31. A writer in pne of the Melbourne papers, speaking ahoqt the pointed faces and rouged lips of Australian women, declares the scores of Melbourne women are lineal descendants of Jezebel. A famous artist once advised husbands to castigate their wives if they painted their faces. If the advice were followed, the great bulk' of the women of Melbourne and Sydney, to mention only two of the States, would be under the lash. To paint their faces is something of a fetish with Australian wpmen. Many of them do not' even do it artistically. At close range it sometimes looks as though it had been applied with'the slapdash ferocity of the man who paints a house fence. And they all do it—flappers rind mothers alike. It is no uncommon thing either to see 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 have been applied with a thumb nail or a trowel; there are faces which create . the impression that the owners are | members of some pierrot troupe who have come into town hurriedly, having forgotten to wash their paint and powder off. That they believe the paint to be unseen is a triumph of their imagination rather than of their art.

There was a day when a blushing girl waVa pretty sight. To-day, she cannot show the crimson blush because of the crimson paint. The whole thing is pitiable. Doctors denounce it. Nature avenges it.” And what is said of women in Melbourne is unfortunately true 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 the world.