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My Glamorous Grandma, My Stylish Mum and Her Sisters and Brothers circa 1960. Grandma never left the house without applying full make-up including her trademark red lippy! I'm loving all those handbags. Elizabeth Taylor, photographed by Henry Clarke, 1967 Since the earliest movies shot their stars to fame, women have been inspired by what they've seen on screen, which by its very nature demands larger than life beauty, charisma, and style. After visiting the cinema, women gave themselves Louise Brooks haircuts (they still do) and dreamt about Garbo's otherworldly beauty. A few years later they dyed their hair platinum blonde after Jean Harlow and longed for legs like Betty Grable's or a bosom like Sophia Loren's. Nothing has promoted the idea of glamour in all its forms more than the cinema, whether we are watching Audrey Hepburn's gamine charm or Liz Taylor's more-is-more fireworks, or Marilyn Monroe's- well - Marilyn Monroe. Au...

British Vogue November 1925 You have been warned! "There are no ugly women, only lazy ones," declared Helena Rubinstein, one of the great pioneers of the cosmetic industry. Well, nothing requires more effort or precision than perfect red lips or fabulously manicured crimson talons. But then nothing has quite so great an effect on transforming the face and hands. Properly painted lips and nails, saturated with scarlet, speak volumes about the way you regard yourself in terms of the outside world. They are nothing less than a red flag for impeccable glamour. How maddening is it then when your absolute favourite lipstick is brutally discontinued? I am still mourning my Chanel Lune Rousse no:36. (92200 Neuilly) 

In my dreams I look like this...... In my mirror I look like this. Never mind. After all, I am a work in progress.                                                

Well, that's it. Children and students are back at school, college, and university. Politicians are back in Parliament and summer 2016 is ending. We are heading toward 'Leaf-Fall.' Burnt orange crispy leaves fall from the trees, the sun shines bravely but hazy, the apples turn brown on the dead yellow grass and the first phlox appears.... " It is a sad moment when the first phlox appears. It is the amber light indicating the end of the great burst of early summer and suggesting that we must now start looking forward to autumn. Not that I have any objection to autumn as a season, full of its own beauty: but I just cannot bear to see another summer, go, and I recoil from what the first hint of autumn means." Vita Sackville-West. Autumn inevitably brings chillier seas, a thought that has never really occurred to me, but it does today as I think of the hundreds of thousands of souls who will be boarding their death-boats to try living. Autumn will b...