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"" UllsT' Her flapper days encU
iSL I ed.. few decade go;
by John E. Gibson
Cartoons by Ben Thompson
How much can you tell about a person just by
looking? Well, science has found that if you
know the signs to look for you can frequently tell
far more than you'd ever suspect. '
The Cleveland Clinic's Dr. Leonard L. Lovshin
has spent many years carefully checking, testing,
and cataloguing the various telltale signs which
give away personality secrets and make a person
as easy to read as an open book.
Take the wearing of dark glasses, for example.
Now there's nothing wrong about wearing dark
glasses outside and when the sun is shining. But
Dr. Lovshin has found and leading clinicians
agree that the wearing of dark glasses indoors, or
outside on days when the sun doesn't shine, is a
strong indication of neurosis. The dark glasses act
as a shield for the emotionally insecure person to .
hide behind. Also, as Dr. Lovshin points out, it is
typical of many high-strung and overly nervous
individuals that they cannot tolerate light even
though it is not bright by normal standards.
There are, of course, cases where a person who
is perfectly normal will wear dark, glasses when
the sun isn't out: prominent persons traveling in
cognito or people who have eye trouble, for ex
ample. But these are exceptions, not the rule.
Tinted lenses, incidentally, have the same con
notation as the wearing of dark glasses. "It is
exceedingly difficult to fit glasses for a tense, high
strung, worrisome type of person," Dr. Lovshin
points out, "and every eye specialist has had the
experience of having such a person protest plain
tively that the glasses did not fit right, even after
they had been changed three or four times. In
desperation, the ophthalmologist often prescribes
a tint for the lenses and the patient is somewhat
happier with them."
Dr. Lovshin's investigations also show that
women (entertainers excepted) who pluck their
eyebrows and pencil in a line may be neurotic.
And though the fact that a woman dyes her hair
was found to have no particular personality sig
nificance, brunettes who bleached their hair plati
num blonde very definitely tended to be mal
adjusted. (So take a look at their hair roots, boys,
before calling your shots on this one.)
What about people who wear toupees? The
wearing of a toupee, Dr. Lovshin finds, is not in
itself clinically significant. But a badly matched
or poorly fitted toupee is something else again. And
the person whose hairpiece doesn't look as if it
quite belonged there isn't likely to have a well
balanced personality. But if you can't detect that
the fringe is phony, there's no penalty on this one.
Other signs found to be associated with a neu
rotic or emotionally unstable personality were a
whining or weepy voice, widely dilated pupils, and
repeated sighing.
But the sign of greatest significance, Dr. Lovshin
finds, is the presence of fluttering eyelids. Eyelid
fluttering simply does not go with a well-balanced
personality. To be really proficient at this, a
woman must be hysterical or at least have a full
blown neurosis. This type is frequently observed
in doctors' offices.
"The typical picture," says Dr. Lovshin, "is that
of a delicate 'sissy type of young woman who tells
the doctor all her 'horrible symptoms while man
aging a sweet, brave smile and a chaste fluttering
of the eyelids. The mechanism of this fluttering
is not known, but it cannot be reproduced volun
tarily to the same delicate degree."
He also finds that the middle-aged woman who -paints,
her-li ps. in. a -tiny- oupid's- bow- i- almost al
ways emotionally immature; and if a baby -like
voice is included in the picture, you've got an