BEYOND THE LOOKING GLASS: America's Beauty Culture

Class is a function of fashion""--Miss Perutz has served our seven billion dollar industry with class and while admitting her own guilty self-preoccupation and susceptibility to all those bottled and packaged products which will make you young and lovely, she's only too aware of the sham and expensive chicanery. She's also (rightly) concerned with the psychological implications since your makeup kit is also your identikit (cf. importance of cosmetic surgery or even just weight reduction in the psychotic). And throughout the relativity between your mirror image and your real self-image. Miss Perutz has taped much of this material and/or experienced it herself (i.e. a beauty cloister in California for pampered femmes who would be more fatales) and her coverage is superb: from Revlon and that ""functional"" Ponds to Vogue and Cosmopolitan (where Helen Gurley Brown just mumbled hurriedly her schema--""making it. . . making good. . . making love"") to hair and hairdressers (particularly Kenneth) to star surgeon (former producer Dr. Franklyn) to the Weight Watchers to models and celebrities and all those Beautiful People, to Unisex and Uniage. Her referrals it must be admitted are more limited--Dr. Margaret Mead seems to preside most of the time. . . . But, does she or doesn't she, will she or won't she? She will--it's as shiny and sybaritic as mink oil.