By Gregory Clark, August 21, 1926.

The judges in Toronto’s beauty contest started out with a scoring system.

The general ratio of beauty was to be 80 per cent. for face, 40 per cent. for figure and 10 per cent. for carriage and deportment.

They had to chuck arithmetic out.

Along would come a girl with a face and head so like an angel’s the judges wanted to reward Heaven by giving her eighty per cent – though she had a figure as shapeless as a boy’s

Or it would be a girl with a face and head as jolly and hard and rough as a boy’s but with a figure divinely proportioned. And it seemed to the judges only just to the selective powers of this girl’s ancestors to mark her not less than seventy-five.

So they chucked any attempt to arrive at an appreciation of beauty by means of statistics. They got up on the judges’ stand the first night of the contest with a fairly clear idea of the cardinal points of beauty and their relative values. They ended up, the fifth day of the contest, judging beauty just the plain, homely way you and I Judge beauty – by psychic sense.

Beauty cannot be scored half the face, two-fifths the body and one tenth the grace of carriage.

Beauty is a force, a power, an energy. It throws off an aura. It strikes some psychic sense other than the sense of sight. When beauty comes before your vision, it is appreciated by an unknown and unnamed sense seated somewhere close to the dwelling place of your spirit.

“Half the girls,” said Mr. Henry Button, one of the five judges, “who entered the contest had some of this psychic appeal, in varying degrees. They created varying impressions of sheer beauty. Nearly all had obvious charm. But those who lasted through the selective process up to the semi-finals were those girls who had that indefinable blending of the features of beauty – head and face, figure and grace of movement – and then that something else besides which I cannot, for the life of me, find the word for -which roused that subtle sense which responds to beauty.

“The odd part of it was that not only did the judges all respond to it – and we were close to the subjects -but the crowd responded, too. Mind you, the judges all determined to arrive at their decisions regardless of any demonstrations by the onlookers. We were under no obligations. We are none of us in politics. In fact, it rather settled us, who were raised to the eminence of Judges of beauty, to find that our selections were also the selections of the populace.

“When you consider the women men marry – and the men women marry – though this was a contest involving feminine beauty alone – when you consider the women men marry, isn’t it amazing that the conception of beauty should be so unanimous as the demonstrations at Sunnyside clearly indicated?”

All Toronto Bows to Beauty

The answer, Mr. Button himself supplied it, is that men do not marry the outward form of beauty for itself alone.

“No doubt many plain people are beautiful within,” said Mr. Button. “Beautiful characters beautiful minds, voices, manners. They may be unable to create the impression of beauty with their outward semblance, but can stimulate vital impressions of beauty by their minds or out of the psychic forces of their spirit. Yet it seems to me that people who are beautiful in the external features must be beautiful within. All this outward perfection cannot be meaningless mere chance, mere pot luck in generations of breeding. Nature, I should think, works outward from within.”

What is beauty?

Toronto has been considering beauty for two weeks. A hundred and fifty thousand Toronto people assembled at Sunnyside during those five evenings of judging, to consider beauty. It is vain to discredit the gatherings by saying that vulgar curiosity brought the crowds there. Far more can be seen at any of the bathing pools. The press, with a couple of stodgy and slightly psychopathic exceptions, has been filled with pictures of girls and with the discussion of beauty. Beauty has been the talk of the town, around supper tables, on porches, over bridge tables and over dishpans, for days and days.

In countless homes, it has been said “If only this contest weren’t so vulgar, our Lizzie would go in there and clean up on all of them!”

Fathers looked upon daughters with new interest and pride. Mothers retraced strange, dizzy paths back to girlhoods of which these daughters are the reincarnation. Lovers have talked of beauty. The lips of puzzled young men have been opened. Beauty is a thing Toronto – a city filled with inhibitions more than prohibitions – is shy of. The Old World has inherited beauty from a loose and creative past. America to the south has been beauty-mad for years, screaming about it in her publications, her movies her stage. But Toronto – if you ask about the beauty of the Sons of England memorial at University Avenue and College street, someone tells you the war record of the Sons of England. If you breathe against the beauty of the Parliament Buildings, you are informed that a distinguished Buffalo architect designed them. There is an answer to everything: Yonge street, the economic considerations of real estate; a certain recent sky-scraper, business before pleasure. Toronto has had more than its share, in the past, of those historic covenanters who regarded beauty with dark suspicion.

For two weeks, Toronto has been considering beauty. You cannot consider beauty without it reflecting some soft effulgent light back upon your own countenance. Social psychology is potent stuff. The city-wide contemplation of the question of beauty may result in a new era in the life of an intensely practical city which appears to esteem so many, many things before beauty.

What an Elderly Spectator Saw

In the crowd assembled around the judging stand at Sunnyside there was conspicuous a middle-aged man. He was conspicuous because of his type. He did not belong to the gentle, genial, easy-going amusement-hound style of man which is familiar on Sunnyside. One of the newspapermen, curiously studying the crowd spotted him, a hard, austere type, the kind of man, the reporter thought to himself, who was there to condemn. Several times, during the first evening, the reporter’s eyes picked him up in the crowd, and the flinty gaze was fastened with a veiled look upon the girls as they wheeled in five and stood before the judges.

The next evening, the same man was there, closer. With him was a lady, obviously his wife. The two stared without expression at the gay and decidedly exciting scene. The reporter tried to conceive what curious, inverted impressions were moving in the minds of these two elderly members of a generation from which the younger generation has heard a great deal.

They were to the fore the third night, and the fourth night, the reporter – nerve is one of the first qualifications of reporters – made it his business to stand beside the man and to engage him in conversation.

“I have been here every night,” said the reporter.

“So have I,” confessed the elderly man.

“Yes,” said the reporter, “I’ve noticed you.”

The elderly man looked at the reporter narrowly.

“You see,” said the reporter, “you are older than most of the audience, and I noticed you, thinking you might be one of those who condemn this sort of demonstration.”

The elderly man was silent for some moments, chatting quietly to his wife and ignoring the reporter.

Then he turned to the reporter and said:

“I would like to tell you about this. And I don’t think it would do any harm. My wife was visiting friends in Parkdale, and they sent me off after tea to amuse myself at Sunnyside. I saw the crowd that first night, and stopped to look. We had one child and we lost her just as she was becoming a young woman. That is twenty years back. I saw a girl on the platform that night who was the living image of our girl. I brought my wife the next night, in the expectation of seeing her again. She did not come on, but we saw another one who was very like. Then we came again last night, and the one we thought was the image of our girl was selected as one of the semi-finalists. There has been another one again to-night, though it will sound absurd to you.

“But it is a long time back. We think they are all very beautiful, don’t you?”

The reporter withdrew very quietly.

Among those crowds of people, there must have been thousands of little miracles such as this, which beauty can perform.

A pompous individual approached one of the judges and said:

“Your decision, I am glad to note, spells the end of this bobbed hair nonsense.”

But it does not. Four of the five final winners had unbobbed hair.

“But we were no more conscious of that fact than of the religious denomination or the political views of the contestants,” said Mr. Henry Button. “Of course, it may mean that a greater impression of beauty is conveyed by a girl whose hair is left long. In my opinion, bobbed hair improves the prettiness of a pretty girl. But I have not yet thought whether long hair improves the beauty of a beautiful girl. There is quite a distinction there.”

Every Girl is in Beauty Contest

Titian, Romney, Reynolds never painted bobbed hair beauties. Our conception of beauty is rooted in the past. Art’s age long selection of the beautiful in women has come down to us in painting and statuary. They all had long hair. This may unconsciously have biased the judges and the public – for the public acclaimed the winners even as the judges selected them – in favor of the girls who were reminiscent of the old masters and of the Grecian statues.

“But,” said Mr. Button, “I think it would be interesting to dress up the statue of the Venus de Milo in a smart modern frock. I wonder if she would still maintain her reputation?”

All of us have gone through the experience of thinking some girl a beauty until she revealed a discordant note.

Many a girl is beautiful until she smiles. No end of girls are beautiful so long as they are dumb. The minute they speak, the impression of beauty vanishes into air. Bad teeth, queer writhing of lips, raucous, or squeaky or nasal voices, and no matter how you concentrate on the outward semblance, it takes a powerful imagination to recapture the impression of beauty.

Every girl in the world is engaged in a beauty contest. Beauty, either outward or inward, is the first and possibly the sole appeal a girl has for a man. Consciously or unconsciously, every girl in the world is attempting to display what beauty she possesses. It is the ancient law.

“We did not hear their voices,” said one of the beauty judges. “We did not see them smile. They stood before us, expressing only what their external beauty and their carriage could express of what was within. At the last, we had to make the semi-finalists smile. Then we knew. If we could have spoken to them, we would have known more.”

But once you pass the simplest requirements “face 50, figure 40, deportment 10,” you get info a realm of beauty that is as complex as life itself.

For here we come to the secret of the beauty contest which is being waged, endlessly, feverishly, in our midst and all the world over eternally, the beauty contest of life. In the beauty contest of life, more than face, figure and deportment are involved. Into this greater contest, a thousand subtler factors of beauty enter. Then voice and smile, thoughts, deeds, actions, the mind in sickness and in health – health, ah, there’s a beauty factor! – come into play, to create the psychic impression of beauty watch makes its appeal to the supreme court of beauty, the young men, the prospective husbands of the world.

Some men swear by blonds, others are moved by nothing less than a raven brunet. Why? Away back in the making of us all are factors which determine our likes and dislikes in the realm of beauty. A man might have a beautiful but spiteful and bad-tempered mother. He will seek a girl who is gentle and sweet, let beauty pass. A man will have spent his life amidst severe and stiff women. He will, by the force of reaction, be attracted by gay and happy girls.

Reaction to environment, they call this. A man raised in a lively and rowdy atmosphere at home seeks a demure and quiet little wife. The legend of the “minister’s son” proves this

Maybe the girl a man marries may not be in the champion class as regards “face 50, figure 40, carriage 10,” but each man makes his own secret score card. If we could read into men’s most guarded thoughts, we might find some such scoring as this:

“Face, 30; figure; 10: carriage, 0; fun, 15; laugh, 25; tender hands, 10.”

Or it might go:

“Face, 10; figure, 5; carriage, 0; money, 85.

But most often, we would likely find some such rating as this:

“Face ? figure ? carriage ?, but eyes, deep as the sky, glorious jeweled windows looking into a secret place where love abides and I alone may go, 100!!!!”


Editor’s Note: This article is about the very first “Miss Toronto” contest held in 1926. Photos from the contest and a wall mural in Toronto can be seen here.