Choose for Your Hair the Style That Suits Your Face

We are in an age in which the importance of showing off a woman's head in its most beautiful form grows ever greater, and in which the houses of beauty vie in inventing new fashions for the hair. That is because they realized, from of old, that this crown which wreathes a woman's head has a great effect in multiplying her beauty or in smothering it.

In past ages, long hair was among the marks of the beautiful woman; she was careful to keep it long and thick, and showed her art in putting it up lock by lock, or in leaving it flowing loose over bared shoulders — and in this was beauty, all of beauty...

At the opening of this century, woman began gradually to rid herself of this burden; she uncovered her shoulders and her neck, and the old women hung the cut-off braids in the family's keepsake cupboard...

...And the daughter of the twentieth century walked with a light step; her short hair allowed her the time that helped her exercise her art upon its style — now short, extravagantly short; now grown in length down to the shoulders — through dozens of forms.

Each season a certain style spreads abroad, its use prevailing over the other fashions, and the girls hasten to copy it blindly, taking no heed of whether it suits their faces or does not suit them...

The modern young woman, who is careful of her beauty and elegance, must not commit such errors and so wrong her beauty unforgivably... For this reason, every lady, before adopting a certain style for her hair, must first of all make sure that it suits her face and accords with its principal lines...

The way to do this is to stand before the mirror and, with the help of her comb and her brush, discover the style most becoming to her face.

But your mirror, madam, is your faithful judge — do not join a second judge to it; and it is well to call in a second mirror so as to be able to see the shape of the head from behind and from the sides...

The face that suggests to some the shape of a 'heart,' and to others a triangle with its base upward and its point downward — such a face is suited by a style like the one above: short hair lifted at the sides in soft coils that bring out the marks of femininity along the cheek... and those rounded kiss-curls above the eyebrows give the face a touch of enchantment...

But if the face tapers gradually to a sharp chin, it is better for its owner to follow the style that appears in the drawing below: a side part, the utmost simplicity, and a graduated cut, short in front and lengthening as it moves toward the back, as is plain in the three drawings.

Be wise, madam, in choosing the preferred style for your hair, the one that suits the shape of your face — for on this choice of yours depends, to a great degree, the measure of your beauty and its effect upon people.