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Artistic Disorder. While industry leaders set the fashions in products, fashions in women's grooming are set by a different, more remote breed. U.S. women wait anxiously on the decrees of such men as Antoine, aging (seventyish), wavy-haired dean of U.S. hair stylists, who has turned more heads than a nation of Casanovas. From his headquarters in Paris, Antoine lays down the law for the 48 Antoine salons that are part of Seligman & Latz, the nation's largest beauty chain (292 salons). He is responsible for the page boy, the pompadour, the Italian cut, the tousle and the bubble bob, has just decreed for fall a "tousled-up Madame Reácamier" style (forehead fringe, slightly curled bouffant sides, and a high-rising back). Antoine's advice: "Try to achieve a look of artistic disorder."
To achieve artistic disorder—or the well-groomed look of order—the beauty-conscious woman spends half an hour daily making up at home, has a cabinet full of the latest beauty aids. Says a Montclair, N.J. insurance executive whose wife wears Wings on her forehead at night to smooth out wrinkles: "I kiss her good night, and I think I'm in bed with American Airlines." Playwright-Author Jean (Please Don't Eat the Daisies) Kerr wears so much cold cream at night that she says: "I go to bed like I'm going to swim the channel. My husband doesn't like it, but what's he going to do?"
Why do women chase the elusive dream of beauty with such frightening energy? The obvious answer—that they want to appear more attractive to men—is only part of the truth. Women insist that it is the psychological lift that makes cosmetics important in their lives. Says Mrs. Ruth Kay, a Cleveland housewife: "If I feel down, I take extra pains with makeup. When a woman feels she looks her best, she radiates a pleasant attitude and gives the entire family a lift. Without makeup she is self-conscious and won't put her best foot forward."
The Oldest Search. The search for youth and beauty is as old as woman herself. Thirteen centuries before Christ, when ancient Egypt's Queen Nefertete was the ideal of beauty, Egyptians placed cones of scented unguents on their heads to melt and thus perfume their faces. The Greeks used makeup and perfume, prized a fine appearance so highly that Athenian magistrates fined sloppy women. In Imperial Rome, women blackened their eyelids, whitened their skins with chalk or white lead, used animal fat and eggs of ants to treat their skin. Ovid scolded his mistress: "Did I not tell you to leave off dyeing your hair? Now you have no hair left to dye."
By the 18th century, cosmetics and perfumes had become so popular that the English Parliament passed a law declaring that any woman who "shall impose upon, seduce and betray into matrimony any of His Majesty's subjects by virtue of scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, or bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty against witchcraft, and the marriage . . . shall be null and void."