When Did People Start Wearing Makeup

This section includes products such as rouges and lipsticks. The text below provides some historical context and shows how we can utilise these products to explore aspects of American history, for example, the links betwixt changes in American feminine identity and the American beauty industry. To skip the text and go directly to the objects, CLICK HERE

Shop window advertising sign for face powder, creams, rouges and perfumes

A shop window advertising sign depicting a pale-complected, reddish-lipped dazzler idealized at the start of the 20th century. Warshaw Drove of Business Americana, Athenaeum Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

In eighteenth century America, both men and women of the upper classes wore make-up. But, shortly after the American Revolution the use of visible "pigment" cosmetics (colored cosmetic for lips, pare, optics, and nails) by either gender gradually became socially unacceptable. For most of the nineteenth century few paint cosmetics were manufactured in America. Instead, women relied on recipes that circulated amidst friends, family, and women'southward magazines; using these recipes, they discreetly prepared lotions, powders, and skin washes to lighten their complexions and diminish the appearance of blemishes or freckles. Druggists sold ingredients for these recipes, as well as the occasional fix-fabricated grooming. Painting i's face was considered vulgar and was associated with prostitution, so whatsoever product used needed to appear "natural." Some women secretly stained their lips and cheeks with pigments from petals or berries, or used ashes to darken eyebrows and eyelashes. Woman worked to attain the era's platonic feminine identity; a "natural" and demure woman with a pale-complexion, rosy lips and cheeks, and bright eyes.

In the 1880s, entrepreneurs began to produce their own lines of corrective products that promised to provide a "natural" look for their customers. Some of these new companies were small, woman-endemic businesses that typically used an agent system for distribution as pioneered by the California Perfume Company, later rebranded as Avon. This business model allowed many women to brand coin independently. Also, more than women were earning wages and buying cosmetics, thereby enlarging the marketplace further. Women could brand a living in the burgeoning cosmetics trade equally business owners, agents, or factory workers. Most of these entrepreneurs came from fairly humble origins, and some managed to transform their local operations into successful businesses with a wide distribution of their products. Florence Nightingale Graham, for example, was the daughter of tenant farmers, and worked many low-paying jobs before opening a dazzler shop for elite clients and reinventing herself as Elizabeth Arden. African American women as well establish success through this model, but faced extra obstacles. Many white shop owners refused to consider stocking African American dazzler products until successful businesses like that of Madam C. J. Walker created plenty of a demand through other distribution channels.

By the 1920s, it was stylish for women, especially in cities, to wear more than conspicuous make-up. This shift reflected the growing influence of Hollywood and its glamourous new film stars, as well as the fashion of theater stars and flappers. "Painted" women could now also place every bit respectable women, fifty-fifty as they wore dramatic mascara, eyeliner, dusky eyeshadow, and lipstick like the stars of the screen. The growing ethnic multifariousness of the United States besides influenced how cosmetics companies marketed their products. "Exotic" or "alluring" ethnic stereotypes became inspirations for brand-up fashions that ostensibly reflected the American melting pot. White women could experiment with a trendy, exotic identity – and so wash it off. African American identity, however, was explicitly excluded from this indigenous mingling. In the late 1920s and 1930s, it became stylish for white women to sport the appearance of a "healthy" tan. Previously, a tan had been equated with working-form women who performed outdoor labor; now a tan identified a woman as modern and salubrious, participating in outdoor recreations and leisure. Make-up colors were marketed in various "suntanned" shades, giving women the option to remove the "tan" whenever they wished to reclaim a fair complexion.

At this fourth dimension, the cosmetics business organization experienced a major shift. Modest cosmetics companies, many of which were owned by women, were replaced by larger corporations. Business models had inverse: in guild to remain competitive and achieve wide distribution, a business had to engage in wholesale bargaining with male-endemic chain drug and department stores. Because women were usually excluded from these distribution channels, about female-owned businesses could non compete. By 1930, a small scattering of companies controlled xl% of the cosmetics industry. These companies now released thousands of factory-produced, similar products nether various make names.

Female agent selling Mary King cosmetics

1930: The J.R. Watkins Company owned the Mary King Cosmetics line. Here, agents sell Watkins products and Mary King cosmetics. Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Spending on cosmetics increased dramatically when millions of women entered the workforce during the 2d Globe War, gaining greater independence and purchasing power. Younger women embraced an overtly flirtatious persona, signaled through the conspicuous use of bold rouge, powder, lipstick, and blast shine. Many working women wore shorter, more "manly" hair styles, and make-up was used to reassert femininity. When nylon stockings became unavailable because of war-time commodity shortages, women turned to leg make-up—paint-on hosiery maintained the illusion of nylon-clad legs. Cosmetics advertisements and armed forces recruiting campaigns during the war emphasized women's dual responsibilities: back up the state of war effort and maintain one's feminine identity through the use of make-upwards. Government-produced posters encouraging women to bring together the state of war effort depicted female nurses and factory workers in bright red lipstick and dark mascara. Makeup, especially lipstick, had become such an essential component of American femininity, that the federal government quickly rescinded its wartime materials-rationing restrictions on cosmetics manufacturers in order to encourage use of make-up. As Kathy Peiss writes in "Hope in a Jar," the apply of make-up had become "an exclamation of American national identity."

After the war, lxxx-ninety% of American women wore lipstick, and companies similar Avon and Revlon capitalized on this now-ingrained fashion. Past the 1950s and 1960s, teenage girls were normally wearing make-up and cosmetic companies devised separate marketing campaigns to target the younger age groups.

In the belatedly 1960s, using makeup became politicized. Counter-cultural movements celebrated ethics of natural beauty, including a rejection of brand-upward altogether. Cosmetics companies returned to advertisements that claimed that their products provided a "natural" look. These ideals nonetheless relied on racial whiteness as the basis of feminine dazzler, but under continued pressure level from women of colour, major cosmetics firms began to cater to the African American market, not only by producing products geared toward black women (ofttimes under separate brands), but also by hiring black women as sales agents. However, the and then-called "ethnic" segment of the cosmetic market remained small, making up merely 2.3% of total sales in 1977.

1977 Revlon advertising campaign for the "Polished Ambers collection...an exciting collection for black women." Revlon Advertising Drove, Athenaeum Centre, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Bibliography ~ see the Bibliography Department for a full list of the references used in the making if this Object Group. Still, the Brand-up section relied on the following references:

Gill, Tiffany G. Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women'south Activism in the Dazzler Industry. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Jones, Geoffrey. Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Printing, 2010.

Jones, Geoffrey. "Blonde and Blue-eyed? Globalizing Beauty, c.1945–c.19801." The Economic History Review 61, no. 1 (February i, 2008): 125–54. doi:ten.1111/j.1468-0289.2007.00388.x.

Morris, Edwin T. Fragrance: The Story of Perfume from Cleopatra to Chanel. New York: Scribner, 1984.

Peiss, Kathy Lee. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America'south Beauty Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.

Scranton, Philip. Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modernistic America. New York: Routledge, 2001.