Frowzy | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 29, 1885

Frowzy.

WE refer particularly to the average female head of the present period. The old symbol of extreme disorder—the "hurrah's nest"—was feeble for this emergency. Each particular hair does not stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine, but they all stand, or, more accurately, lean and slant in all possible directions, to that degree sometimes to excite special wonder how, in the name of confusion worse confounded, the thing is done. To sleep in it unkempt for a week of restless nights may accomplish the result, but one would think hardly. Are there "professors" of capillary confusion? and do they go from house to house frizzling and frowzling, and complicating and corrugating and convolving, and disarranging and disordering and disheveling, and inverting and involving and inside-outing, and tumbling and tangling, and topsy-turveying, until the result is achieved which we see?

The suggestion may seem irreverent, but we hardly think some ladies can be aware how much, by this process, they make themselves to look unlike human beings, and like the shag-giest variety of the dogs known as poodles; nor how uninspiring are the esthetic, and more particularly the intellectual, results.

There is, to be sure, this comfort. The fashion, like all which are essentially unnatural and ridiculous, will, before long, blow over. Yet one cannot help longing for the time when our dear ones shall come back to us in their old beauty, and De Medici, rather than Medusa, set the fashion of their hair-dressing. Yet we will confess that our longing is perturbed by the fear lest the pendulum when it swings shall swing towards some other outré and ugly direction, exchanging one abomination for another. And we are moved to lift up a cry for some power to give—at least to the generations that shall come after us, if the boon be too great for immediate bestowment—brains enough inside of the head to establish the settled conviction that simplicity is always more beautiful than ostentatious gear, and that for each woman to dress to suit her own personal tastes, and needs, and position in life, is a better thing than to run with the multitude to ape foreign fools.—

Congregationalist.