The makeup artist’s hand hovered over the vintage lipstick molds. “I feel like we’re quite heavy on the waxes. It takes a little bit of building up, but the color’s amazing. ” I dabbed the homemade formula onto my hand, and it left a rich, glossy smear that looked almost like lacquer.
This was what women in the 1920s would have done—made their own cosmetics from recipes in books, because the industry was only just being born. I was standing in a studio, preparing to recreate a full 1920s and 1930s makeup look on my model, Queenie. She had grown up watching YouTube tutorials and could probably do every modern look in her sleep. “What would you still consider a shocking makeup look?
” I asked her. “Very like neon, but also using makeup not just to look pretty, but for an effect. It’s about making a statement and really rebelling,” she said. I wanted to show her how rebellious the 1920s look actually was.
That era was the birth of modern Britain. After the horrors of the First World War and a pandemic, a generation of young people was determined to enjoy its freedom. And the ultimate symbol of that modernity was the 1920s beauty—the flapper. At the start of the decade, wearing colored cosmetics was still seen as daring.
There weren’t many places to buy them. But if you were bold and had enough money, you could go to Selfridges, one of the first stores to openly sell makeup. They had the first-ever makeup counter. Originally it was at the back of the store, but by the end of the 1920s, cosmetics had moved right up front and center, largely because Mr.
Selfridge loved everything modern. He was also associated with the Dolly Sisters, twin celebrities from Hungary who became the darlings of fashionable London. Vintage makeup collector Madeleine Marsh told me they were the pioneers of the “it girl” look. The writer Aldous Huxley said everyone had to have that serpentine slimness and look like Art Deco buildings—shiny, dark, and modern.
The Dolly Sisters led the way. To achieve that look, women cut off their hair. I showed Queenie the authentic 1920s shingling clippers. “As beautiful as your hair is, no self-respecting flapper would have hair this long,” I teased.
“You’re going to make me look like her? ” she asked nervously. “Yes, we are. ” I laughed.
“But don’t worry, I’m terrible at hair, so I’m not going to put you through that. Just tie your hair back so I can do the makeup. ”
The era also brought new grooming habits. Once skirts became shorter, hairy legs were a problem, so suddenly tiny little shavers were advertised everywhere.
And with all that Charleston dancing, women were perspiring, so deodorant ads appeared. One brand, Odorono, promised to ensure your “personal daintiness. ” It was ironic, because there was nothing dainty about going out all night, smoking cigarettes, dancing, and wearing short skirts. It was shocking, but after a world war and a pandemic, people were desperate for fun.
To understand the makeup revolution, I had to think about the cinema. During the interwar years, the weekly trip to the movies was the biggest mass entertainment. Bryony Dixon, curator of early cinema at the British Film Institute, showed me a vault of hundreds of thousands of cans of old film. Young hopefuls from all over America were jumping on trains to Hollywood to see if they had the “film face.
” Film studios held competitions to spot the next star, and girls arrived in pairs, looking shy and uncomfortable in their screen tests. One winner, Sybil Rhoda, had that luminous glow and tiny lips that made her a perfect movie star. Early film actors used crude stage makeup, but advances in film quality meant it no longer worked. That problem was an opportunity for Maksymilian Faktorowicz, a Jewish Polish immigrant.
He changed his name to Max Factor and invented flexible greasepaint that looked natural on camera. When regular women wanted the same look, he rebranded it as “society makeup” to make it respectable. That led to the creation of pancake makeup, which was a smash hit. It was easy to use, didn’t crack, and gave women that flawless Hollywood look.
My pharmacist friend Sue had tried to recreate the original Max Factor pancake formula from vintage recipes. But when I applied it with a wet sponge, it just pilled on the skin. “I’m afraid that’s been a fail,” Sue admitted. We laughed, but it showed how skilled the original formulators must have been.
I decided to use a modern equivalent instead. I also experimented with a 1919 eye shadow recipe based on my own vintage Maybelline compact. When I first opened that old compact, I was surprised—the blue was so bright it looked like a modern pigment. The recreations Sue made were greasy and needed a lot of blending, but they gave that authentic, creasy look you see in old movies.
Sue’s mascara was phenomenal. I joked I wasn’t going back to modern formulas. The eyebrow pencil was trickier—the payoff wasn’t great and it was very waxy. That explained why starlets’ eyebrows often looked so overdrawn in old photos.
For Queenie, I chose the Theda Bara look—the smoky-eyed vamp. I used the eye pencil with a little water to blend it out. The film would have made it appear much darker than it was in real life. For mascara, we used the real-deal soap pigment.
Women at the time would have spat onto the brush or directly into the mascara—that was considered completely normal. The 1920s also introduced a novel product that’s now a makeup must-have: bronzer. I was jealous of a vintage mannequin head I nicknamed Claudette, who had the most wonderful bronze cheeks. The trend started because of Coco Chanel, who went on a cruise to Cannes in 1923 and accidentally got sunburnt, inadvertently starting a global trend for tanned skin.
For centuries, women had tried to hide sunburn with white powder. Suddenly, they were trying to recreate it. I made my own “artificial sunburn” by melting beeswax and olive oil with red and brown ochre pigments. It smelled delicious and spread beautifully, giving that rosy, tanned glow that catches the light.
The sun-kissed look was now desirable, and ideas of beauty were shifting. Dancer and actor Josephine Baker became a global superstar and beauty icon. Cultural historian Dr. Michelle Crossfield explained how Baker’s image still appears at the center of mood boards today.
She came to Paris at 19 for La Revue Nègre and rose to fame, but her success was complicated. In the US, she was deemed too dark, and even in France, the things she capitalized on could be used against her. Still, she took agency over her image. She had makeup collaborations with a French jewelry company, like a powder-compact bracelet for the movie Zouzou, and Baker Fix, a hair brilliance.
She once said everyone wanted to be café au lait like Josephine Baker. Her success as a black woman was exceptional, but it would still be decades before non-white faces regularly made it into the mainstream beauty industry. The industry was expanding, and that meant more choice. We had gone from two or three shades of rouge and lipstick to endless options.
Sampling began—you could buy a mini puff and try out colors before committing. Rouge had been around for millennia, but the 20th century introduced synthetic reds. Sue made me several rouge samples from a 1934 book. There was a silly trick about putting a hot flannel on your cheeks to find your matching blush shade.
I tried the basic carmine and loved how it made everything sparkle. The late ’20s and ’30s saw the birth of makeup brands still around today, like Max Factor, Boots No. 7, and Elizabeth Arden. Marketing became more sophisticated, and packaging became objects of desire.
Makeup was imbued with a sense of luxury and even mystique, and nothing said modernity like science. Beauty spas had an almost clinical feel, and that white lab coat culture started in the 1920s. Helena Rubinstein, an entrepreneur from Poland, launched her first cream, Creme Valaze, and sold it as a miracle containing herbs from the Carpathian Mountains. In fact, it was waxes, lanolin, and pine bark essence.
When her partner suggested selling it for a shilling, she refused, saying women wouldn’t buy anything that cheap—they wanted something “reassuringly expensive. ” She sold it for seven shillings and seven pence. It worked. We also made our own lipstick.
Sue showed me the carmine pigment and dye, and we set it with paraffin wax. We poured it into a tin foil mold around a glass pipette and set it in sand. When it was done, it looked glossy, almost like lacquer. The color was beautiful.
Lipstick itself wasn’t new—pigments had been used since the ancient Egyptians—but the delivery system was. You could now apply color directly from a tube, whenever and wherever you wanted. Fashion also dictated lip shape. Following the movie stars, I used a lip stencil inspired by Ern Westmore’s designs to give Queenie a small Clara Bow mouth.
Clara was the quintessential flapper, the first American It Girl, known for her cute bob and cupid’s bow mouth. I used concealer to make Queenie’s lips look smaller, creating a rosebud shape, which felt counterintuitive compared to modern trends of bigger pouts. By the mid-1930s, lipstick was no longer a daring statement. You could buy makeup on any high street.
Boots had started selling color cosmetics through a campaign designed to appeal to every woman. Archivist Sophie Clapp showed me their No. 7 brand, which was a game-changer. It used an unknown model to represent the ordinary woman, focusing on bringing out your own loveliness rather than copying a star.
One ad said, “Only you should know the rouge is there. ” It was a slow progression into color, to avoid frightening the regular consumer. Wearing something too outrageous still carried social condemnation—a makeup faux pas in Surbiton in 1935 could make you the talk of the neighborhood. By the late ’30s, the beauty industry was an integral part of life for most women.
A contemporary survey showed the contents of a young working-class girl’s handbag: a nail file, powder compact, powder puff, lipstick, vanishing cream, eyebrow pencil, tweezers, mirror, comb, hairpins, and nail polish. Her comment was perfect: “You see only the bare necessities. I should be lost without my handbag. ” In just two decades, women went from scrambling to find a lipstick to carrying a whole makeup shop in their bags.
Now it was time for the finishing touches on Queenie. I couldn’t persuade her to cut her hair, so we did a marcel wave instead. With the full face of cosmetics complete, I stood back. “And that is your vampy look.
What do you think? ”
“I really like it,” she said. “Could you see yourself going to a party in this look? ”
“Definitely with the eye, yeah.
”
“I think you’ll look amazing. ”
It was fascinating to see how shocking this brightly painted face must have seemed after the natural look of just a few years earlier. The smokey-eyed vamp was daring and tricky to get right. Some of our recreations failed—the foundation was a disaster, the brow pencil was difficult—but the blush and lipsticks were huge successes.
That shock of red truly illustrated how women’s place in society was changing. In Britain, wearing makeup had at times been the preserve of the rich, a sign of loose morality, or something to be hidden. In the 1920s and 1930s, all that changed forever. By the Second World War, women were told that beauty was their duty.
Putting on red lipstick was no longer a rebellious act but part of lifting morale and helping the war effort. Both the joy and the tyranny that makeup brings were here to stay.
