GARBO and GLAMOUR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 121, 17 October 1941, Unnumbered Page

GARBO and GLAMOUR

E hear from Hollywood that \X Greta Garbo has altered her hair style and colour. She has had it tinted very pale blonde, called "Moonlight Blonde," and cut short in a cap of curls patterned after Botticelli’s paintings. The front of the hair is cut in a short Napoleonic fringe with the ears exposed. The whole effect is one of studied shagginess: A variation of this style has already become popular in New Zealand, and is likely to become very common in England owing to the shortage of hairpins and hair-clips, which are now severely rationed. A busy London hairdresser complains that she is allowed only a pound of hairpins.a month among 20 assistants, and that often customers have to wait for their hair to be set until preceding customers are released from the drier and the hairpins taken from their heads. Before the war, something like a pound of hairpins a day were swept up from the floor each evening and thrown away because no one would bother to pick them up. (Continued on next page).

(Continued from previous page) But the new coiffure does not solve Garbo’s problems. In her new comedy, Garbo has to play a dual role-twin sisters, one of whom is very glamorous and chic, the other rather dowdy. To distinguish one from the other is a matter of hair styles, and at the moment, the directors are debating whether a girl is more glamorous with her hair brushed up in a pompadour or swinging in a long bob. No one can decide. We should say it depends on Garbo. But the solution would surely be to introduce a third style instead of the two alternativeshair pulled back across the head and trussed up in an odd-shaped bun at the back, the whole fastened together with long celluloid hairpins, or perhaps black wire ones. These would be bound to drop out at intervals, creating the inevitable wisps which are known all the world over as the hallmark of dowdiness. We doubt if even Garbo could glamorise wisps.