Foreign News: Poor Uglies

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"Human ugliness is waste!"

With this slogan the city of Berlin has just established the first Advisory Bureau of Social Cosmetics.

Reporters who went out last week to get copy about Berlin's free civic lipsticks, rouge and eyebrow pencils, were tolerantly received by Dr. M. Gumpert, director of the Bureau and a plastic surgeon of renown. They did not quite understand, he said. There will be no free "cosmetics" as that frivolous term is commonly understood. Instead, the Bureau will try earnestly and scientifically to render reasonably presentable poor folk who are now too repulsive in appearance to get work. Citing cases among the pitifully ugly and poor who applied to the Bureau on its opening day, Dr. Gumpert told of a half-starved seamstress who had had no clients since her face became covered with large nauseating warts. She is on the dole now—a charge upon the Government— but when the Bureau has dealt with the warts she should soon win back her profitable trade. Recalling that Berlin has a standing idle army of some 200,000 unemployed, Dr. Gumpert cried: "Look at them! How many are ugly—needlessly! Thousands will have work when we have helped them."