WHAT PRICE BEAUTY?
Meyer, Ernest L.
What Price Beauty? By ERNEST L. MEYER "MORE than a billion dollars is spent annually by the women of the United States in their struggle to retain youth and beauty," says a magazine writer....
...And chances are that mama will fall in love with a gurgling gigolo like Sinatra and begin to hate papa because papa's voice, even in its best singing moments, sounds like a bull elephant that just inhaled a canister of red pepper and is looking wildly for the town pump...
...She has sold her birthright for a pot of massage...
...There is nothing more sad than to watch a modern grandmother trying to act a nightingale just because she has had her crow's feet amputated...
...She makes papa get into his tuxedo and take her to the Swooning Swan Night Club...
...No, indeed...
...She keeps her bald-headed husband out of sight and talks gig-glishly about her "girl friends...
...That's How Trouble Starts Neither is she going to sit quietly in the parlor and let papa admire her, which would be wholesome and economical...
...Wrinkles Were No Sin The modern woman, truly, pays a price for pulchritude...
...Nowadays they wear brief-cases...
...She looked an elderly woman...
...She tries to be exuberant, but remains merely an ex...
...They were concerned with minor problems: problems of the household and the harvest and the family health, all of those trivial matters that wrought wrinkles and gray hair...
...We thought of them rather as badges of courage, of tokens of a long life well and bravely lived...
...She will not believe that a woman's face is in her home, but goes out to put it on exhibition...
...Those, of course, were the old-fashioned and modest days when women still wore bathing trunks...
...Read there the menu for the beauty-minded, including weight-reducing courses, odor-removers, face creams, hair-dyes, lipsticks "exciting . . . vivacious . . . that convey unspoken urging," and a marvelous nail lacquer that comes in many lustrous shades including green dragon, ming yellow, black luster, blue dragon, royal plum, heavenly mauve, mandarin red, Canton red, Burma red, dragon's blood, temple fire, brown coral, opium poppy, coolie, flowering plum, wistaria, weeping willow, blue moss, and china doll...
...The disintegration of many a home can be traced directly to a made-over chin, and many a ship of matrimony founders on a permanent wave...
...When a woman creates a new face for herself she wants a new frame for it...
...Before the gentlemen of the budget moan piteously and charge the billion to silly vanity, will they please take a look at the picture of grandmother taken in the neighborhood of her 40th birthday...
...When an elderly woman has a fresh face made for herself, there is one big danger...
...Now conjure up a picture of modern women at a like age, well-groomed persons who contribute their part toward that billion dollar total, young things with smooth faces and chin lines that defy the closest scrutiny...
...One can imagine few more anguishing moments than those experienced by a lady of uncertain years faced with the added and onerous uncertainty of whether to brandish, for tonight, fingernails colored royal plum, dragon's blood, or opium poppy...
...Our lucky, lucky grandmothers...
...In the evening she would immerse herself in three flannel petticoats and stay home and knit a muffler for Uncle Hugo...
...When she gets her face lifted she is not going to set it down on the kitchen table to jell...
...When a modern middle-aged woman enters her boudoir and spends two hours wrestling with face creams, perfumes, eyebrow tweezers, depilatories, massage ointments, mascara, nail polish, and wrinkle removers she is not going to stay home and play p&rchesi with the kiddies...
...When they entered a room they were accompanied by the faint and frugal odor of drygoods...
...She wants to be admired by men and turn up her new plastic nose at the women...
...She tries to cultivate a youthful manner to go with the youthful face...
...Hence she wants to be on the go continually, to scatter her Parfum Aphrodisia to the envious winds...
...And in grandma's eyes there was that peace which comes with the knowledge that age is a kudos instead of a curse...
...Ads Assault Their Vanity It is true enough that our grandmothers, when they were middle-aged wives, would capture no beauty prizes at Atlantic City...
...Well, I don't know...
...No such momentous matters for decision confronted them...
...She becomes flirtatious, daring, dangerous, and discontented...
...That's how trouble starts...
...One might charge a youthful face up to profit if it ended there...
...She made no attempt to buy a new nose and go out and ogle the whale-oil man...
...To be sure, modern women are not entirely to blame for this nonsense which makes every Chloe yearn to be a Cleopatra...
...And quite pitiful, really...
...Too often she can't get away with it...
...Maybe we had better turn the ledger and enter the billion dollars under profit...
...Pick up any magazine aimed at the ladies—say the January issue of the Woman's Home Companion...
...The modern woman of the same age knocks you over with thunderbolt fragrances retailing at $15 an ounce...
...But in those days we did not consider wrinkles and gray hair as sins to be hidden...
...She is fat, fifty, and flirtatious...
...She wants to take it out and give it an airing in society...
...This adds enormously to the original investment in ointments...
...They are victims of a costly and very successful advertising campaign which assaults their vanity...
...But grandmother, somehow, stayed put...
...But it doesn't...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 4
