Roundabout
Beauty Is As Beauty Does
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN, I have a poor friend whose speciality is beauty, and she spends her whole life going round testing the various aids for the ageing, not only make-up but everything from nature and for half an hour cures (starvation and enemas) to Zen Buddhists who diagnose through the soles of the feet. She is always getting into trouble for smoking in her room, or throwing up the special diets, or simply failing to suspend disbelief; and she says of the beauty courses, 'They all find things wrong. with me that need a year's treatment— but it's a different thing every time.' Her friends notice that each one makes her look more un- well than the last, and that when we say, 'You're looking wonderful—what is it?' she always says she's been giving them all a miss for a fortnight.
She has a fund of absurd stories about the trade. One woman who makes good but rela- tively cheap herbal creams has clients send round empty Elizabeth Arden jars to be filled— which is at least one better than a woman who waited until she got to the face-pack stage of her beauty treatment, leapt up, tore off her eye- pads and proceeded to fill a bagful of bottles with the scents and lotions on display. The only trouble was th.at they were filled with display liquid. Possibly the commonest form of beauty snobbery is the tendency to covet and display huge bottles of scent on the dressing table— which, since scent goes off if exposed to light and air, is about as sensible as displaying a half- full magnum of champagne on the sideboard.
The beauty girls get a good laugh out of such things as the girl who was sacked from one firm for wearing a rival's lipstick, but in some ways their job is about as jolly as that of a Court poison-taster. There was the case of the explo- sive eye-liner, for example, which brought one • newspaper girl out in boils, and actually blew up all over another girl's newly-covered dressing table before being hastily withdrawn. And there was the big hormone scandal, the best sick joke of the decade: the reason it took so long for hormones to lose their reputation as a panacea was that most of the side effects were so rude that the women simply couldn't bring them- selves to mention them. Some came out in hairs in the most peculiar ,places; others grew oddly patchy; and others—well, what that poor woman in the Bible had for sixteen years they had for six months or until they stopped the stuff. Small wonder that the amount of hormone in a jar is now limited by law; or that the Euro- pean Committee on Chronic Toxic Hazards (who go by the charming brand name of 'Euro- tox') should have decided last November that it was high time there was more control of the constituents of cosmetic preparations.
The beauty girls are at least let off plastic surgery. So they are spared the fate of one wretched woman who came into a private beauty specialist a few years ago muffled right up to the eyes. She refused to unwrap until she was actually in the treatment cubicle, and the reason was that she had hard extra- ordinary lumps round her chin like a tree growth. She had had a treatment, very popular a few years ago, in which wrinkles are padded out by injections of wax under the skin—said also to be used by the secret service to disguise the shapes of their faces. And she had gone out to the Far East, and the intense heat had melted the wax, which had somehow found its way downwards. No amount of treatment was any good, and she had to have an operation. Heaven knows what superannuated spies do.
But it is the parallel with alchemy that is per- haps the most intriguing thing about the beauty business. The tendency to go to a hidden crone rather than someone operating openly in the marketplace; the• willingness to believe the crone when she tells you that the magic did not work because you have not had enough of it, not because it is the wrong magic; the endless search for a talisman, a philosopher's stone, the secret of eternal youth: all these are sheer wizardry. And there is a subtle parallel, too. Cosmetics can be found to contain mink and silk, avocado and herbs, turtle oil and shark oil and the jelly the queen bee feeds on (the most expensive cream in the world contains the last three and about twenty others—though some say that if they did have any effect, they would cancel out anyway). Mink may give mink- handlers soft, pretty hands, as alleged; far more important is the attempt somehow to acquire the qualities of something you admire by absorption, as a savage eats a stronger savage to get his strength, or a gazelle to make him run swiftly; or as a fanatic believes that you can acquire saintliness from a saint's bone.
The latest expression of this superstition of absorption is the use of alcohol in soap. Beer has for some time been used to set hair (an eighth' of a bottle of brown ale commonly com- ing out at half a crown on the bill), and this works simply because the sugar in the beer sets firm like a cold soufflé; it is at least an im- provement on the Renaissance version of the same thing, which was cow's urine. Now they have introduced whisky and beer shampoos, with a good deal of confusion all round: one man at the launching party complained that his whisky tasted soapy, and a secretary was ill all night after drinking the beer shampoo.
It is no doubt all a great deal of nonsense and hardly to be redeemed by the one or two people, like Katharine Corbett and the Countess Csaky who do seem to work wonders. The one consoling thing, for those who have spent years and pounds on hope alone, is that fresh air and exercise and soap and cold water don't work either.
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