Sunday 18 November 2012

History of Makeup (part 3)

By the French Revolution of 1789 fashion changes developing since 1775 took effect. The new female hair fashion was to wear a wig of arranged curling coils on top of the head letting the natural hair fall loosely down the nape of the neck.

As the 18th century came to a close, all things Roman were in fashion with cropped simple hairstyles. This was soon replaced by a vogue for all styles Greek and the simplicity of freshly washed hair copied from Greek vases was thought attractive.

Women in the 19th century liked to be thought of as fragile ladies. They compared themselves to delicate flowers and emphasised their delicacy and femininity. They aimed always to look pale and interesting. Paleness could be induced by drinking vinegar and avoiding fresh air. Sometimes ladies discreetly used a little rouge on the cheeks, but make-up was frowned upon in general especially during the 1870s when social etiquette became more rigid.

Actresses however were allowed to use make up and famous beauties such as Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry famous beauties of the 1880s could be powdered. Most cosmetic products available were still either chemically dubious, or found in the kitchen amid food colourings, berries and beetroot.

A pale skin was a mark of gentility. It meant that a lady could afford to not work outdoors getting suntanned which was then considered vulgar and coarse. Continuous work in sun and harsh weather coarsened the skin then, as it does now. Parasols were de rigueur and used to protect the complexion. Rooms were shuttered with dark heavy velvet curtains to keep out the sun's rays.

During this time it was thought that a woman's crowning glory was her hair. It was rarely cut, usually only in severe illness. It was also supplemented by false hair depending on the current fashion.

After 1886, Harriet Hubbard Ayer promoted face creams and various anti-ageing products. Before that, little that was satisfactory had been available.


 Eugene Rimmel (1820-1887) was a French perfumer and businessman responsible for manufacturing and marketing some of the earliest commercially made cosmetics. The most innovative invention might be the first commercial non-toxic mascara product. It became so popular that rimmel is to this day the word for mascara in several languages including French, Italian, Persian, Spanish and Turkish and German.

 As photography steadily became more popular, from 1870 to 1900, so too did cosmetics. An amateur photographer of the time referred to photographs as “permanent mirrors,” while Oliver Wendell Holmes, upon viewing Mathew Brady’s photographs of Civil War battlefields, called the camera a “mirror with a memory.” Increasingly, sitters insisted that their images be improved upon for the special occasion of a portrait. Enameling—lacquering the face with white paint— therefore came into vogue. “American women who ordinarily shunned paint requested it at photographers’ studios,” according to historian Kathy Peiss. H. J. Rodgers, in his 1872 manual of photography, advised women not just on what clothing was most flattering in a portrait but also provided them with many pages of cosmetic recipes. Clearly, women took advantage of such concoctions, as the photographs themselves attest. In a series of portraits from the 1880s, for example, Baby Doe Tabor, who married a silver magnate in the Colorado town of Leadville, displays eyebrows unapologetically darkened by artificial means. Stage actress Charlotte “Lottie” Mignon Crabtree unabashedly wore kohl on her eyes (and rouge on her lips) in the carte de visites she passed out liberally to her fans. Photographer Henry Peach Robinson lamented the vanity of his clients. “All kinds of powders and cosmetics were brought into play,” he said, “until sitters did not think they were being properly treated if their faces and hair were not powdered until they looked like a ghastly mockery of the clown in a pantomime.”

1900-1907  several entrepeneurs started selling door to door mostly hair remedies and  Sarah  McWilliams made herself with persistence a Millionaire.
Other than that a lot of hair straighteners came around as well as permanent wave solutions and curlers.

By 1909 Selfridges opened in London's Oxford Street and they openly sold cosmetics. Cosmetics displays were openly visible to the customers and were no longer hidden under the counter. 

Elizabeth Arden (December 31, 1878 - October 19, 1966) was a Canadian businesswoman who built a cosmetics empire in the United States. Still in 1909, Arden formed a partnership with Elizabeth Hubbard, another culturist. When the partnership dissolved, she coined the business name "Elizabeth Arden" from her former partner and from Tennyson's poem "Enoch Arden".

In 1912, Arden travelled to France to learn beauty and facial massage techniques used in the Paris beauty salons. She returned with a collection of rouges and tinted powders she had created. In an era when it was only acceptable for stage performers to wear makeup, Arden introduced modern eye makeup to North America. She also introduced the concept of the "makeover" in her salons.

Arden collaborated with A. Fabian Swanson, a chemist, to create a "fluffy" face cream. The success of the cream, called Venetian Cream Amoretta, and corresponding lotion, named Arden Skin Tonic, led to a long-lasting business relationship. This revolutionized cosmetics, bringing a scientific approach to formulations. other innovations included creating foundations that matched a person's skin tone; creating the idea of the "Total Look" in which lip, cheek, and fingernail colors matched or coordinated; and the first to make a cosmetics commercial shown in movie houses.

The word mascara derives from the Italian maschera, which means "mask" from Middle Latin masca or Arabic Maskhara or from Old Occitan masco. Modern mascara was created in 1913 by a chemist named T. L. Williams for his sister, Mabel. This early mascara was made from coal dust mixed with Vaseline petroleum jelly. The product was a success with Mabel, and Williams began to sell his new product through the mail. His company Maybelline, a combination of his sister's name and Vaseline, eventually became a leading cosmetics company that we know today.

Max Factor, Sr. (1877 - August 30, 1938), born Factorowitz or Faktorowicz in Poland (then Russian Empire), was a businessman and cosmetician who founded the Max Factor Cosmetics Company. He is known as the father of modern cosmetics.

Factor’s father was a rabbi and could not afford formal education for his ten children. Aged eight, Factor was placed in apprenticeship to a dentist/pharmacist.

He opened his own shop in a suburb of Moscow, selling hand-made rouges, creams, fragrances, and wigs. His big break came when a traveling theatrical troupe wore Factor’s make-up to perform for Russian nobility. The Russian nobility appointed Factor the official cosmetic expert for the royal family and the Imperial Russian Grand Opera.

In 1904, Factor and his family emigrated to the United States. Factor made a new start in St. Louis, Missouri, at the 1904 World’s Fair. He sold his rouges and creams, operating under the newly re-spelled name Max Factor. Factor saw an opportunity to provide make-up and wigs to the growing film industry. He moved his family to Los Angeles, California, in 1908. In 1914, Factor created a make-up specifically for movie actors that, unlike theatrical make-up, would not crack or cake. Soon, movie stars were filing through Max Factor’s make-up studio, eager to sample the “flexible greasepaint” while movie producers sought Factor’s human hair wigs. He allowed the wigs to be rented to the producers of old Westerns on the condition that his sons were given parts. The boys would keep an eye on the expensive wigs. Factor marketed a range of cosmetics to the public in the 1920s, insisting that every girl could look like a movie star by using Max Factor make-up.

 Lipstick became widely popular after Maurice Levy's 1915 invention of the metal lipstick container. It was available in salve, liquid, and stick forms, and long-lasting, indelible stains were the most popular. "Natural" lipgloss was also invented, which used bromo acid to create a red effect as it reacted with the wearer's skin. Finally, flavored lipstick was also popular, with the most popular variety being cherry.

In the 1920s, different products were also developed that showed the decade's preoccupation with shaping the mouth. Metal lip tracers, made in various sizes to satisfy the wishes of the wearer, were developed to ensure flawless lipstick application. Helena Rubinstein created a product called "Cupid's Bow," that billed itself as a "self-shaping lipstick that forms a perfect cupid's bow as you apply it." The development of the mirrored lipstick container in the 1920s also points to the importance of shaping the lips through the application of lipstick.

 The eyebrow pencil really took off in the 1920s, in part because it was technologically superior to what it had been, due to a new ingredient: hydrogenated cottonseed oil (also the key constituent of another wonder product of that era, Crisco Oil). This likely helped the pencil glide more easily and, just as important, kept it from “blooming” with bacteria.

Greta Garbo wielded the eyebrow pencil skillfully and in doing so transformed the face of America. When she arrived in Hollywood, Garbo was an “unretouched Swedish dumpling” who had “the shadow of a double chin, frizzy hair, and slightly buck teeth.”

 The fair-skinned trend continued up until the end of the Victorian era. Niels Finsen was awarded the Novel Prize in medicine in 1903 for his “Finsen Light Therapy” . This therapy was to cure infectious diseases such as lupus vulgaris and rickets disease. Shortly thereafter, in the 1920’s, Coco Chanel accidentally got burnt while visiting the French Riviera. Her fans apparently liked the look and started to adopt darker skin tones themselves. In addition, Parisians fell in love with Josephine Baker, a “caramel-skinned” singer in Paris. These two French women were two trendsetters of the transformation of tanned skin being viewed as fashionable, healthy, and luxurious .In the 1940’s, women’s magazines started using advertisements that encouraged sun bathing. At this time, tanning oil and bathing suits that left little to the imagination were coming out. In the early 1930's, South Australian chemist, HA Milton Blake, experimented to produce a sunburn cream.In 1944, Florida pharmacist, Benjamin Green invented a suntan cream in his kitchen that became "Coppertone Suntan Cream."

 One “Mrs. Brown,” as she would later be referred to in a congressional hearing, let herself be talked into having her eyelashes and brows dyed. “Mrs. Brown’s laughing blue eyes have been blinded forever,”34 Ruth deForest Lamb wrote in her American Chamber of Horrors, a 1936 book detailing a number of horrific products consumed by the American public in the name of beauty (including the depilatory Koremlu as well as mercury-based skin “whiteners”).
Congress, urged on by Lamb’s book and after numerous chest-thumping congressional hearings, finally acted to regulate cosmetics in 1938. But the controversy over such products as Lash Lure was widely publicized long before then.
The 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act brought cosmetics and medical devices under control, and it required that drugs be labeled with adequate directions for safe use. Moreover, it mandated pre-market approval of all new drugs, such that a manufacturer would have to prove to FDA that a drug were safe before it could be sold. It irrefutably prohibited false therapeutic claims for drugs, although a separate law granted the Federal Trade Commission jurisdiction over drug advertising. The act also corrected abuses in food packaging and quality, and it mandated legally enforceable food standards. Tolerances for certain poisonous substances were addressed. The law formally authorized factory inspections, and it added injunctions to the enforcement tools at the agency's disposal.

 Though the Depression cut into the beauty business, it eventually proved a boon by getting more women out to work, making them more conscious of their appearance. In World War II Washington politicians foolishly talked of abolishing the beauty industry for the duration to save materials. But wiser heads prevailed. (When Hitler banned makeup, the women of Germany simply refused to work.) The industry put its lipsticks in cardboard containers, found substitutes for strategic materials. One substitute: a cream type of hair tonic that is outselling the older oil type today. By war's end, sales of cosmetics had increased 53%.

 World War II has a dramatic effect on women's position in society. The absence of men forces them to step into traditional male roles at home and at work. Fabrics are scarce, and the austere mood is reflected in practical clothes in muted shades. Max Factor introduces stocking cream in response to shortages. Make-up fulfils an important role as an instant feminiser and affordable morale booster, and is even produced in shades to match air-raid shelters and gas masks. Red lipstick is seen as a symbol of patriotism, as women defy hardship by maintaining their appearance.

 It was soon after World War II that Miss Bishop, a trained chemist who had worked in a dermatologist's laboratory, developed a nondrying, nonirritating, long-wearing lipstick. (Long-lasting types contain high amounts of colorants called bromo acids that have staining qualities.)

In 1950, she formed Hazel Bishop Inc. to manufacture and market her discovery. ''Never again need you be embarrassed by smearing friends, children, relatives, husband, sweetheart,'' the early advertising said, pointing out that older formulations tended to leave greasy marks on glasses, cigarettes and teeth. And the new brand did not have to be applied several times a day.

The brand found instant acceptance. When it was introduced that summer at $1 a tube, Lord & Taylor sold out its stock on the first day. The brand soon captured 25 percent of the fast-growing lipstick market and locked horns with Charles Revson of Revlon in ''the lipstick war.''

 An explosion of colour – in everything from films and furniture to clothes and make-up – epitomises post-war optimism. There is a renewed emphasis on the family. A shortage of men encourages women to try to look as beautiful as possible in the hope of 'catching' a husband. As women return to domestic duties, technological advances result in a whole host of new labour-saving devices for the home, giving them more time to pamper themselves. A boom in the luxury beauty industry – led by Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein – ensues. Avon calls for the first time, and the door-to-door cosmetics rep remains the bored housewives' best friend for the next 20 years.

 In an era of increased political activity, the women's liberation movement emerges, generating a backlash against the concept of prettying oneself to please men. Women also realise that the beauty industry is governed by and perpetuated by men, and eschew the defiant lipstick-wearing of their suffragette sisters to denounce make-up and embrace the natural look. The publication of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch inspires an anti-establishment look. Boiler suits are donned, bras are burned and women stop shaving their armpits and legs. Despite the growing assertion of black culture – symbolised by the popularity of the Afro hairstyle – major cosmetics companies continue to ignore the need for a beauty range suited to darker skins. Iman, a Somali-born diplomat's daughter, becomes the first black supermodel.

 Materialism and consumerism are the buzzwords and a super-glam look personifies the get-rich-quick philosophy of the times. Vanity is celebrated and decadent; expertly applied make-up symbolises the high-maintenance grooming of the trophy wife. The 'Princess Di' becomes the most popular hairstyle of the decade. Paradoxically, the increasing profile of animal rights groups highlights the vivisection inherent in the survival of the cosmetics industry. Growing consumer unease is appeased by The Body Shop. Founder Anita Roddick's aim of sourcing cruelty-free and natural ingredients from ancient cultures and threatened communities, while highlighting global issues, proves that conscience shopping can be a commercial winner.

 Consumers become increasingly sophisticated. A desire to enhance one's natural beauty with lighter, less visible formulas results in a scientific approach to cosmetics that appeals to users. Cosmetics no longer just cover-up but are 'light-reflecting' and 'wrinkle-defying', too. The battle to rid the body of cellulite with expensive creams and body-toners dominates, while the growing interest in celebrity looks sees top make-up artists such as Bobbi Brown launching highly successful independent ranges. Supermodel Iman, frustrated by the appalling lack of ranges to suit women of colour, succeeds with her own make-up line. Meanwhile, Isabella Rossellini, famously dumped by Lancome for being too old at 43, launches her own Manifesto range, designed to suit women of all ages.

 As the population grows ever older, the urge to remain youthful blossoms and the anti-ageing cream becomes king. Much cosmetic surgery is increasingly accepted as risk free. Quick-fix treatments, such as collagen lip implants and 'Botox' anti-wrinkle injections, can be performed in a lunchtime; while other treatments, such as facial skin peels and electric wave therapy, are increasingly popular.




Of course there is so much more , but I think this is a very good  collection of how Makeup came around and where it went.

to find all these informations i read up in some books, wikipedia  and xtimeline.com 

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