Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 303, 14 March 1928, Page 4

Mundane Musings

Ain’t We Nice ? At one time it was every girl’s ambition to be beautiful or, failing that, pretty. Everything in petticoats (and we really did wear them in those remote days) aimed at one or other of these targets, and even if Nature hadn’t been very kind we often managed, with the aid of much prayer and fasting, to achieve the desired effect. We tortured our hair into curls and piled it, ribbon threaded, on the top of our heads, we adored white muslin and floating lengths of tulle, and soft shades of pink and blue were our ideal colours. Enormous hats, often feather wreathed, shaded our limpid eyes, and, of course, in those halcyon days, no large bills for make-up figured in our accounts. Make-up was considered fasti The few women who frankly admitted their limitations and refused to enter for the beauty competition had no alternative but to look frankly hideous in ferociously hairy tweeds and boatshaped hats. Perhaps we sometimes envied them their comfort, but we woudn’t have admitted it for the world. We sneered at them and spoke of them as “the masculine type of woman.” But, Lord me, as a small boy of my acquaintance always says, how times have changed? The last pretty girl 1 saw was sitting forlornly against the ball room wall while her weird sisters, with their Eton crops and strangely made-up faces, were dancing their slim legs off. Pale blues and pinks are as extinct as the dodo, and even the babies are giving up their curls. In short, the goddess of beauty sits neglected in her shrine, and we run to lay our offerings in the skimpy lap of our newest passion—chic.

It’s hard, perhaps, on the hapless owners of golden curls which won’t brush out, and big blue eyes which can only look innocent, but it’s pleasant for all the rest of us. I don’t pretend, that the goddess of chic isn’t every bit as exacting in her demands on our time and trouble as her predecessor, but at least you can be sure of pleasing her, whereas only too many of us failed dismally to achieve even prettiness in our pilgrimages to beauty’s shrine.

, Look at Mary Martin, for example. She’s very much like her mother was as a girl, mouse-coloured hair, honest , blue eyes, tall, and inclined to be t heavily built. Her mother, in spite of • all her efforts, never succeeded in look- ■ ing anything but a lump in her little white evening frocks, and dressy day gowns, but Mary always looks per- ; fectly turned out. She wears slipfly- • cut tailor-mades or straight, richlycoloured evening frocks and has her 1 brown hair shingled and brushed back from her well-shaped forehead. Then there’s Sheila, who is small without being petite. In the old days she’d have looked merely insignificant, but her queer little face glows with sL strange charm when it’s made up, and her ultra-short frocks, give us a chance of admiring her deliciously slim legs. I’m quite aware that men all say that they like girls to be pretty and that long skirts were graceful. But take them at their word and wear a skirt an inch or two longer than the average. In no uncertain voice they’d label you a dowd at once.