article · Issue No. 44, November 1946 · p. 26 p. 27

Woman's Beauty, Past and Present

جمال المرأة في الماضي والحاضر

Feminine beauty is an engaging subject. It holds first place among the topics of talk in people's gatherings, as it does in the world of the printed letter.

What, then, is beauty — this hidden, bewitching thing before which the ages and the generations have bowed? Is it a fashion? Or is it, one wonders, a convention that people follow according to their tastes and their ways of looking at things? Does beauty pass and fade with the days, changing and altering as women's fashions change and familiar customs shift?

The face of old has changed and altered, beyond doubt — except for certain faces that managed to slip free of every bond, like the face of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, for example. And can we imagine what would happen if one of the faces famed for beauty in bygone ages were suddenly to appear on one of the stages of Hollywood?

Yes... woman's beauty is an engaging subject. It is worthy of study and reflection. And on this page are examples of it, old and new — perhaps they will help toward just such study and reflection!

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