Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (25 page)

While you’re at it, throw out that persimmon taffeta you haven’t had on your back in three years! A closet jammed with half-decent and half-indecent stuff can make you feel you haven’t got a thing to wear.

The Wearing

Try on the dress you will wear to the party, the important date. Look at yourself in the full-length mirror to see how the dress moves from all angles … both seated and standing. A certain style may look better if your weight is rested on one foot, the other foot slightly in front of it. A long tube of a gown may work better with your weight rested on the front foot, the other leg and foot straight back or slightly to the side.

Like a
fashion model
?

You’re damn right!

Isn’t that a little too
much
if you’re just a nice, plain, civilian girl?

Let’s review our lesson.

You’re single. You’d like to be able to stop apologizing for the state. Better still, you’d like to get out of it. Well, maybe getting out isn’t so easy just this minute, but you
can
stop apologizing!

One way to be successfully single and have a lot of friends and beaux around who admire you and tell you so is to look terrific … just a little
more
terrific than some of your complacent married girl friends or some of your fellow bachelor girls who only have the strength to complain but not the guts to
act.

Okay. You’ll have to go to a little more
trouble
than they do.

Psychoanalyzing this dress, and figuring out how to wear a dress to its and your advantage, are part of your arsenal.

No, you don’t have to be self-conscious all evening long and to preen like a peacock. Quite the contrary. Do your homework well at home and go out and have a ball. Once you get the hang of showing off clothes, you’ll do it without thinking. Jeanne, for example, never sits facing anyone head-on in a bare-top dress because her shoulders, as she puts it, are football. She confronts you at a bit of an angle. I would defy anyone to detect that her pose is calculated. It
isn’t
anymore! It’s second nature.

Isn’t it awfully self-centered to spend so much time perfecting a wardrobe, to say nothing of checking off body angles in a mirror?

Psychiatrists say that to look your best and present a pleasing image is
true
self-love … that fatties and slobs are not in such hot emotional shape. They say that only when we love ourselves are we free to love anybody else. You want to be free to do
that
, don’t you? Okay then—lights, camera,
action
!

T
HAT FABULOUS FACE
… can you achieve it by being very, very clever with make-up?

I don’t think there’s a prayer!

The even-featured, alabaster-skinned, meltingly, gaspingly beautiful beauty men go to pieces over can’t be achieved with make-up, prayer, incantations or sending your face back to the factory!

You
can
have something
else
with make-up … an interesting face, an alive face, a sexy face.

Many people try to deprecate the joys of possessing great beauty. They say it’s a curse, a cross, and what’s
inside
is all that matters. Of course, what’s inside matters, but a beautiful outside has a way of making the most rational, charming and intellectual man go all apart. It’s hard to describe what a pretty girl does to him, except to say she’s like catnip to a kitty. Men act
funny
around her … and agitated … like little boys falling out of trees to attract attention.

Maybe you consider this carrying-on downright unpleasant, and maybe it’s been centered about
you
, but I think it would be fun to be gone nuts over without having made any personal effort!

Yet I would defend vehemently that you don’t have to be beautiful to attract men … to keep them by your side a dozen years or longer. And once a man discovers the true fascinator you are, the question of your technical beauty just never comes up!

I’m not talking about girls who are near-beauties … the kind magazines dote on showing in “before and after” layouts. Old Plain Jane “before” only has a Grecian nose, chiseled mouth, even white teeth, firm clean chin. About the only thing wrong with Jane is freckles and dirty hair which they fix for the “after”! A man can spot that kind of beauty
too
and respond. I’m talking about women who are really more plain than pretty.

But to get into the position to sink
into
a man you must at least create the illusion of beauty by
acting
beautiful.

You don’t have to lie your head off and say I am, I am, I
am
when you know damn well you
aren’t—
a stunner. But you must love yourself enough to employ every device … voice, words, clothes, figure, make-up … to become one.

When you do, you can outdistance a beauty in beau-collecting. It happens all the time. And, of course, beautiful women often cancel their advantage by being hopelessly narcissistic. They also suffer incessant insecurity, wondering if a man loves them for anything but their looks.

Nearly every woman is part-beauty. She has one good feature even if it’s just smooth elbows. You play up that feature. You draw a face on the elbow with little eyes and a mouth. (I’m
kidding!
)

And something happens to a woman who has used every cosmetic trick to be more alluring. You think people start calling her “Old Paint”? Nonsense! Because she feels more beautiful on the inside by having made the maximum effort
outside
, she even begins to
look
better. Something of her lifted spirits shows on her skin, in her smile.

I know this sounds like that optimistic drivel you’ve heard many times before. But take Exhibit A: Karen, a very shy girl I mentioned earlier, dressed at the office the other day to go to an important party … authors, tycoons, people like that. She brought her clothes to work because there wasn’t time to go home. During mid-afternoon she realized, after talking to friends, that she’d brought the wrong dress. It was cotton; and the party, though outdoors on a weekday evening, apparently was to be very grand.

There was nothing she could do about the dress; but at five o’clock she slipped out to the beauty shop next door and had them recomb her hair into a very fancy upsweep. (It was freshly shampooed, so they could.) Then she took a fifteen-minute nap. (Her boss was conveniently out of town, the darling.) After that she slowly, ritualistically, painstakingly put on her make-up, starting with fake eyelashes and finishing with a good sousing of Ma Griffe. Karen said she padded back and forth from her office to the ladies’ room (which had the only decent mirror) about twelve times. Then she put on her dress and went to the ball. Karen reported she’d never felt like that at a party before … sort of flawless and go-to-hell! And it netted her a wonderful evening.

What Are You Afraid Of?

Few women wrest from make-up half the magic it offers. They figure it’s okay for
others
, but an exquisite job on
their
faces—pure wishful indulgence!

You probably wear lipstick, powder base and a little eye make-up every day. But have you ever considered drawing in completely new eyebrows, wearing false eyelashes, putting hollows in your cheeks with darker foundation, a cleft in your chin with brown eyebrow pencil or enlarging your mouth by a third? These are just a
few
sorcerer’s tricks available.

Let’s consider the reasons why you, a smart young woman, may not be taking full advantage of make-up.

OBJECTION 1: You don’t know how.

Then
learn!
The beauty pages of magazines tell you continuously what to do to your face and feet and hair and hands and shoulders! If you missed last year’s issues or this year’s so far, start
now. Glamour
,
Mademoiselle
, and
Seventeen
go over the same instructions again and again, slightly regilded to make them current.

Vogue’s Beauty Book
($1), which appears on the newsstands yearly around September 29th, is a treasure house of information. There have been five so far. This is one instance where it would pay to go back to the well. You might try to pick up back issues in a secondhand bookstore. All the articles are reprints from regular issues of
Vogue.

Several full-length books deal with make-up, but they’re a little stuffy; and besides, I can never make head or tail out of the instructions for shaping your hair to go with the angle of your chin.

The best way is to experiment. Put your make-up on different ways. Ask girls who know more about it than you do and do what they’re doing. Try new foundations, new colors of everything. Since you wear make-up to work, that’s a good time to be creative. Every morning, for two weeks, try doing your eyes a different shape—big and round, elongated like a ballerina’s, shadowed, unshadowed. For the same two weeks, wear a different shade of lipstick every single day, especially the colors you’ve been snubbing. Draw on a different mouth. At first, you can’t tell the difference between good and bad on your face, but your eye grows keener and then suddenly, one day before the two weeks are out, you
can.

OBJECTION 2: Cosmetics are too expensive.

It’s true you need a
variety
of cosmetics, especially at first to get you used to working with them. And
especially
later on when you’ll refuse to give them up!

If you’re a new adventurer (you could be forty!), start with cheap things at the dime store. At least you’ll learn about colors.

It’s also true that these skimpy little packets that cost from one to five dollars each don’t look like much on the shelves, but remember … Queen Elizabeth I would probably have traded the British fleet for what’s available to you at Walgreen’s.

Several major companies make samplers of eye make-up shades and lip colors—as many as twelve to a package. This is an inexpensive way to plunge. Sometimes they make small trial sizes of other products.

Fortunately, make-ups last. Can you imagine ever getting to the bottom of a bottle of eye-liner?

OBJECTION 3:
You haven’t time.

Hal King, chief make-up artist at Max Factor’s, says a woman can do a professional job in twelve minutes—foundation, rouge, powder, mascara, eye-liner, shadow, brows … the works. The trick
is
to know what you’re doing—and
do
it.

The elegant beauty editor of an eight-million-circulation woman’s magazine says she gets hundreds of letters from housewives who “haven’t
time
to be beautiful.”

“What do they suppose people like
me
do?” she asks. “I have a husband who eats breakfast just like other men, beds to make, errands to do, buses to catch and have help only for parties. I don’t think anyone could be a great deal busier in the early morning, but somehow I get my make-up on.”

I do my lipstick in the car driving to work—a respectable job, too, with a brush—
after
massaging my gums and
after
rubbing hand lotion into my hands and elbows—also en route. Yes, I drive but I have fifty-seven light signals each way, so there’s ample opportunity. I just wish once I had my lipstick on
before
I got a ticket.

OBJECTION 4:
Men don’t like make-up.

Men just
think
they don’t like make-up!

If you listened to
them
, your lashes would be flaxen, your lips waxen, your skin Albino No. 2. And then—bing!—they’d be off chasing the first beautifully made-up girl who came along. Don’t you
honestly
think you know more than they do by now about how to look nice?

Men don’t like too
much
make-up, but I’m not sure they’re even competent to judge about
that.

A cutie-pie friend of mine wears black mascara, black eyeliner, beefed-up eyebrows, pale peach lipstick, all precision-applied, and her adoring husband brags to friends that his wife doesn’t wear make-up.

The plot is to use all the cosmetics that can possibly improve your looks but use them skillfully. No streaks, no stripes, no jigs, jags or coatings … everything flowing and blended.

I consider top-fashion models the most attractive and beautifully made-up women in the world—not just on assignments but in their daily lives. When they come to our office for television or photographic interviews, all the men in the place sort of hum and buzz. And I don’t know a man who doesn’t adore to be seen with them. Well, you wouldn’t
believe
the amount of make-up that’s gone into that look!

Make-up, like clothes, can change your personality on different days. You can be a baby-eyed angel or a devilish, smoke-eyed siren with the same irises. Never knowing
who
you’ll be next may shake your beau up a bit. That’s good for him! Why always be good old Sue or trusty old Dusty when you know very well most men like variety in women!

A man hates make-up on his clothes, of course, especially if another woman sends the clothes to the cleaner. Well, maybe you don’t like the other woman!

Certainly you needn’t apply fresh lipstick if you know you’re going to be kissed. You may even secretly take some off while he’s walking around to open the car door. (He
does
open the car door for you, doesn’t he?) Here’s a quick trick if you want your lipstick to stay on your lips and not come off onto his: apply one coat, then blot on tissue; powder over the lips, apply a second coat and blot again. The color is on to stay.

As for making up in public, you don’t have to do a complete overhaul; but I see nothing wrong with touching up lipstick at the table. Combing and eye stuff is for the powder room.

OBJECTION 5: Make-up isn’t natural.

Deep down inside perhaps you still think this is a bit wicked, which is understandable. We
are
descended from Puritans, and the fun-is-bad Victorian era only closed officially in 1901. Probably your idea of a real beauty coup would be to get away with no make-up at all!

Come on, now, is there really anything so attractive about
natural
?