The Lipstick Revolution
In the 1920s slathering your lips with a little colour became a symbol of new-found sexual freedom and liberation for women, but its use had its detractors. Leonora Eyles, writing for the Daily Herald in 1928, reveals how she "hates lipstick", as it makes girls' mouths "ugly": "It must be very disconcerting for a young man to kiss a girl whose mouth looks like a large red cut across her face! Recently I noticed a lipsticked girl at tea. Every bite of her bread and butter or cake left a red imprint, and her cigarette end was also red, which had a peculiarly disgusting effect." But there were unlikely supporters, like Roman Catholic priest the Very Rev Owen Francis Dudley, who described the use of makeup as an "act of charity", because "in a general way most faces need occasional decoration and repairing". In 1929 Mr Justice Rigby Swift caused an outrage when he "supposed", during a breach of promise case for a broken engagement, that "a man engaged to a girl has the right to tell her that she must not wear powder or lipstick". The judge sided with the young man – to the disdain of women everywhere. (British Newspaper Archive)
Had to be an Audi
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The Ig Noble Awards
These science prizes are given out each year by the satirical journal Annals of Improbable Research at Harvard University, honouring strange scientific achievements. This year awards went to the following projects:
1. Research done into whether narcissists can be identified by their eyebrows — bushy ones are a sign apparently.
2. The team of scientists who crafted knives from their own frozen faeces as a way of investigating an account of an Inuit man who claimed to have made a knife from his own frozen poo (they found the knives melted and deteriorated too quickly to be of much use).
3. Research work into how alligators signal their body size through vocalising – and they did it by getting one of them to breathe helium, like an idiot at a teenager's party.
4. A scientist whose research suggests widespread fear of spiders among entomologists.
Sleep Talking
Marie Hutchinson dreamed she was in a plane and was dropping off the edge of the Earth. "There were waves and rocks and then nothing. The problem was my now husband and I were on a plane over the Pacific and the crew all thought he was throttling me as I screamed out. We woke up everybody."
