A note of thanks to Helen Carlton, Steve Elliot, and Dr. Edward Hymes for their wonderful help.
—Betty Cornell
Betty Cornell's
GLAMOUR GUIDE FOR TEENS
I'm Betty Cornell. I'm the author of this book and I think it only fair to tell you how I got to be that way. First of all let me say that I don't consider myself any great shakes as far as being an author goes. I'm not a writer. I'm a model. But the truth of the matter is that because I am a model I decided to write this book.
I wrote this book to set down for you the things I learned about beauty being a model—the know-how and the how etc. And because I learned all these beauty basics while I was a teen-ager (I started modeling in high school) I hope that you as teen-agers will find my suggestions helpful. These suggestions of mine are specifically designed for you; they are not designed for your mothers or your grandmothers, although I wouldn't be surprised if you find that older people are borrowing your book from time to time.
The purpose of my book then is to help you teen-agers in making the most of yourselves. If you follow through on what I have written here, I know you will be pleased with the results. I say so because these are the methods by which I made myself over from a chubby little high-school girl into a full-fledged model. Just to prove that I'm not fooling, that I mean what I say, I'm going to review a little bit of my personal history for you. At the end I think you'll see that the only difference between Betty Cornell, the tubby teen, and Betty Cornell, the model, is the difference between a girl who just slopped along and a girl who found out how to look her best.
Not so very long ago, when I was fifteen years old, I was doing all the things any ordinary teen-ager does. I was living with my family, going to school, and being the bane of my older brother Bob's existence. I thought I knew everything. Bob knew that I didn't, and was always trying to prove it.
I remember that one of my biggest problems was the fact that Bob used to rule my social life with an iron hand. He would come to parties where I was having a gay time, ring the doorbell, and announce, "Come to pick up my sister. Time for her to go home." Then, I was mortified. Now I realize that he was doing the right thing.
In fact, I know now that any older brother is about the best social insurance any teen-ager can have. I found that Bob was the best person to tell me what the score was as far as boys were concerned. Lots of the tips on boys that I have included in some of the chapters of this book were tips I first learned from him.
It was then, when I was fifteen, coping with brother Bob and living in Teaneck, New Jersey, a small suburban community not far from New York City (a wonderful town—I still live there), that I decided to become a model. As a matter of fact, I didn't make the decision myself; a friend of my mother's did.
The modeling suggestion was made because I was casting about for a way to earn money for college. When I look back, I can't understand what ever inspired anyone to suggest I would make a good model. I certainly did not look the part. I was fat, with thick legs and an oversize waistline. All I had to offer was curly black hair and the training in muscle coordination I had gotten from dancing lessons and from being a high-school cheerleader.
At any rate, being young and unknowing, I decided to try my luck. And it was luck. I was accepted as a model, but not for glamorous poses. My early modeling career consisted of posing for tubby-teen pictures. I soon learned there was not much future in being a tubby teen. So at sixteen I took stock of my situation and decided to really go to work on myself.
I did all the things that you will read about later in this book. I went on a sensible diet, cut out between-meal nibbling (I used to eat enough between meals to satisfy an army), did daily exercises, cleared up my complexion, and styled my hair. At the end of my self-improvement campaign, I found myself with one of the smallest waistlines of any model in New York. I was no longer a tubby teen. I was a real junior-size model.
In fact my campaign was such a success that when I graduated from high school I found that I did not have enough time between modeling jobs to keep up my college work. So I devoted myself exclusively to modeling. I have never regretted giving up college, for I went on so many trips to Arizona, to Florida, and to Canada as a model that traveling became an education in itself.
As you know, I'm still modeling today. And I still keep right on performing all the simple beauty rituals outlined for you here. Now, I don't guarantee that these rituals will make you a model. That is not the purpose of this book. But I do guarantee that they will make you prettier. That is the purpose of this book. I only point out to you that these beauty routines made me a model, to give you confidence in my suggestions, to prove to you that they really, truly work.
I know teen-agers who have tried my suggestions and I know with what good results. Some time ago I gave a series of lectures in the Youth Center in my home town of Teaneck. It is from this series of lectures that this book has grown. In this book, as in those lectures, all I have tried to do is make suggestions. The rest is up to you. Suggestions aren't good if they're not put into practice. I hope you find, as I did, that putting them into practice is lots of fun.
The reason I say it is fun is because every girl, I don't care who she may be, wants to be attractive. And when you find that with just a little bit of effort you can be more attractive, then the work involved becomes fun. And fun results, too, because a well-groomed girl gets more attention from boys than a messy one, provided of course that she remembers to be pleasant, honest, and not conceited.
So here is my book. It's all yours. Go to it.
"I'm too fat." "I'm too thin." J
Nearly every teen has had one of these figure problems at one time or another in her life. As a matter of fact, some teens have probably had both within the space of a semester or so. The reason this is so is because as a teen-ager your body is still in a state of flux—it has not stopped growing long enough to find its natural balance.
Your body does not completely finish growing until you reach the age of twenty-one or so. Of course, by the time you reach your teens you have stopped growing as rapidly as a baby, but you are still growing nonetheless—if you have stopped growing up, you have started growing out, or vice versa.
But just because your body is restless and refuses to settle down is no reason to despair of having a good figure. It is a question of mind over matter. Start by intelligently figuring out your figure problem. Find out about your body. Are you large-boned or small-boned? Is your tendency toward long-ness and leanness or to shortness and plumpness? Stand before your mirror and contemplate yourself from head to toe. Fish out the measuring tape and take statistics.
Statistics are alarmingly accurate. Chances are when you take yours you will wish they weren't so. Those extra pounds that you guessed you might have gained are unequivocally recorded on the tape measure. What you feared has come to pass, what a popped button or a pulled seam has been plainly insinuating for some time is true: you are overweight.
