Lipstick was chalk: beauty secrets from the era of black & white movies
Long before high definition make-up was even a thing, actresses were working their Oscar-winning looks with simple greasepaint and dark paint swashes across their eyes. Even Max Factor, himself a well known film make-up artist admitted in 1914: "the effect was terrifying!"
What looked beautiful on screen wasn't quite so picturesque this side of the camera; heavy sticks of paint in yellow were used on the cheeks, while dark lacquers were used on the lids as shadows, without a blending brush in sight - and often its fair share of lead to boot.
Until that was, Max Factor himself introduced flexible greasepaint, the first ever foundation designed for motion picture use on actresses (and poor Henry B. Walthall, who would serve as the model for make-up screen testing in Hollywood for years). Together with a new eyebrow pencil, this make-up was thinner, cleaner and importantly, entirely lead-free.
By 1917, Max Factor had added a blending sponge to his range, tweaked the term 'make-up' so it had become a noun, not just a verb, and developed the idea of 'the colour harmony' - that being matching your cosmetics to your hair, skin and eye colouring. In 1920, he had also brought his theatrical products to the public arena - as 'make-up.'
It wasn't until 1923 that Hollywood had its first metal tubes of lipstick either, designed by Maurice Levy and later brought to counter life by Helena Rubenstein, Chanel and Bourjois who introduced its Rouge Pastel; 'a lipstick that holds and you want to hold on to' according to its rather timeless advert. Up until then, actresses had been applying hand blended mixes of castor oil, deer tallow and beeswax wrapped in paper, though with 'caution' as advised by a column at the time in The New York Times.
By the time Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor got their hands on a stick in 1950, dark red lips were in vogue, a survey in 1951 revealing that two-thirds of teenage girls wore lipstick.
