Word: fad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Millions of them-young, 39, and old-are doing it. The hair-coloring fad is the biggest-booming (1956 sales: $35 million v. $3,000,000 in 1946) cosmetic lift since the invention of gay deceivers. Across the U.S., 100,000 beauty shops and drug counters are supplying eager heads with a whole spectrum of tints (cosmetologists never say "dye") that sport such come-on names as Golden Apricot, Sparkling Sherry, Fire Silver, Champagne Beige and just plain Black...
...revival) and the Venetian gondolier's wide-brimmed hat. But fashion is as fickle on the beaches as in the salons of Paris. College girls spending their spring vacations in Bermuda and Nassau this year discovered the virtues of the man's straw hat, enthusiastically spread the fad through whole campuses-and delighted straw hat manufacturers. "We were tired of the big straw hats of last year," says one girl, "so we simply picked a smaller, lighter hat. It happened...
...there is precisely where the hope lies. Originality, for some, has become an urgent compulsion, not merely a contemporary fad. Perhaps the efforts of these few will spur the rest to think, to act, to be themselves. Perhaps somewhere in this vacant land, the value of character and personality will again be forced to the front, to battle with the hollow-eyed crowd of Others. And the battle will be good...
...fad spread, some Britons devised their own ways for dealing with questions ("Oh, they can be solved," said
Actress Yolande Donlan. "Probably by algebra, but not by me"). But to others, the fad merely strengthened their conviction that there was something basically wrong with making children determine their whole future by the eleven-plus ordeal. "The invention of the devil!" cried the Rev. Arthur Morton, Director of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. "I say that future historians will condemn us as much for this as we rightly condemn the people who made young children work in mines...