MANNERS & MORALS: Tinted Women

MANNERS & MORALS

There once was a woman with unsightly feet. People whispered about her as she passed: “Look at that gal with those big, ugly feet.” To distract attention from her unfortunate condition, the woman dyed her hair an eye-catching green. Thenceforth, she was gay, carefree. Everybody noticed her green hair. They whispered about her, as she passed: “Look at that gal with the green hair. And get a load of those feet.”

—Old Story

Many a husband returning home from work at dinnertime last week was startled to find a different-looking woman in the house. To some this brought a sudden, tingling exhilaration, but a second look (perhaps at the feet) established that the wife was the same, only the hair different. It glinted with a new hue. The husband had been dragged into the host of U.S. men whose wives have become touched with tint.

Millions of them—young, 39, and old—are doing it. The hair-coloring fad is the biggest-booming (1956 sales: $35 million v. $3,000,000 in 1946) cosmetic lift since the invention of gay deceivers. Across the U.S., 100,000 beauty shops and drug counters are supplying eager heads with a whole spectrum of tints (cosmetologists never say “dye”) that sport such come-on names as Golden Apricot, Sparkling Sherry, Fire Silver, Champagne Beige and just plain Black.

The tinted women, estimated at one out of three v. one out of ten in 1952, are not reluctant to admit it—except for the greying, who color their hair to look younger. They consider themselves truly liberated. In the days when Cinemactress Jean Harlow showed women a thing or two about the man-catching qualities of platinum blonde hair, the business of hair-dyeing was a secretive thing reserved largely for showfolk. Women retired to back rooms to brew their metallic dyes; slinking out came eye-fluttering hussies. But nowadays, as one TV personality reports, “it’s the same as changing the color of your nail polish. It doesn’t have any more stigma than that.”