Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 118, 9 August 1927, Page 7

Mundane Musings

Masks or Faces

We were listening:, with that horrid fascination that belongs to the subject, to an expert in the uplifting art of renovating faces. “You can only have it lifted three times,” she said. “The first time it lasts for a year. The second time it lasts six months.” “And the third time it falls to your neck, I suppose?” broke in an agitated female, unable to attend the dread climax. I never heard what really happened the third time. It had been bad enough to watch the effect of the first uplift. Not that it had been unsuccessful. All had been done that art could do, and the stiff gait and clawlike hand of an elderly woman had been contradicted by the face of a girl. Nor was her figure less “wonderful” than her face, diet and corsets had achieved their purpose, all that was lacking was the freedom of movement that should have matched those elegant contours. The face was smooth, totally devoid of wrinkles, because a tuck had been made invisibly at the side of each cheek: the texture was soft and tender, as it had good reason to be, since the top skin had been flayed off; the colour was fresh and did not flag through the entire evening, nor could it, since it had been tattooed into the cheeks. “Good bit of -work all round,” said the expert who explained these mysteries.

But again, as with the figure, the essential life was missing. The eyes of an old woman looked out from the girl’s face. The smile was fixed and weary. It made one realise how much a look of youth depends on the mind and expression. I have seen old ladies in caps look much younger than that meaningless mask. It is a pity the artists cannot make masks to fit the face, as in Max Beerbohm’s happy story. Then expressions could also be dealt with, and the sunnily spontaneous smile acquired, as well as the “swimming eye” cultivated by Lady Wishfort, whose “niece affects it, but she lacks features.” It sounds as though she had left them on the dressing-table, as in a Futurist portrait; she should have gone to the beauty experts and purchased a few. That artless ballad-monger, Bayly, bard of “The Mistletoe Bough” and other early Victorian ditties, such as “We met —’twas in a crowd,” and “Oh, no! we never mention her,” understood human nature if he understood nothing else, and showed it in his candid cry; “Oh, give me new faces, new faces, new faces!”

The uplift experts cater not merely for vanity, but for that eternal desire for novelty which comes on us especially in the spring and summer, that bright, light, raw, cold season extolled by insensitive poets who, following the dead traditions of their trade, imagine it to be a time of sun and warmth and renewed vigour when fruit and flowtrs are cheap, instead of a bleak period when clothes look shabby and furs mangy and faces eternally the same. At such a time the artists in cosmetics who know more than the poets and are also psychologists, manufacture silver and sky blue wigs, green rouge and orange lipsticks, vagaries which are, by a tiresome prejudice, limited as yet to fancy dress. Red lips, pink cheeks, pale powder and a restricted range of colours for the hair are so monotonous. Each fresh invention is a votive offering to Venus. The beautiful Maria Gunning was her martyr, dying at 28 from the result of the white lead she put on her face. Ninon de I’Enclos was her faithful priestess with new admirers at 70. But she would have given them all to get a new face. Queen Elizabeth grew so sick of hers that for twenty years she refused to look in a mirror. Mat Prior has written her dirge and that of all ladies who have lost hope or remain too hopeful. Venus take my votive glass, Since I am not what I was. What from this day I shall be, Venus let me never see.