The Makeup Box

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The Makeup Box

In 1965, when I was 12 years old and in the seventh grade my sister who was 8 years older, gave me her purse, since she had gotten a new one.  She also gave me an exhausted lipstick.  I remember it vividly; it was from Avon, and was in a white flute-shaped case with a plastic cameo on the top of the lid.  The lipstick inside was a rather horrid pink color and had been worn down quite flat to the base. Oh, I thought I was sooo grown-up carrying that lipstick around in that worn out old purse.  Besides, it made me more like my adored older college-going sister, didn't it?  Her purse, her lipstick...yes, I became so sophisticated with this acquisition.

Some months later, my mother who was quite a tyrant among other things, went through my purse one day. I caught holy hell for having that lipstick and it was promptly confiscated. You see, she had been a teenager in the late thirties and only racy, loose girls wore lipstick then, so that was her moral basis for this vehement reaction. I don't remember if she had hit me or not, but she might as well have beaten me senseless, as her vicious tongue-lashing had much the same effect.  It pretty much stripped me raw and left me quivering with grief and fear.  Much like that piece of Voldemort left under the bench when Harry Potter is killed and learns from Dumbledore that he, Harry, was a horcrux himself.  (But I digress, and if you're not a Harry Potter fan, you won't understand that analogy whatsoever.)

In my young broken-heartedness and anger over the loss of this treasured lipstick, a symbol of female beauty and adulthood, I told myself that ONE DAY I would have all the lipsticks I ever wanted. And an obsession was born.  Oh, how it was born! Like Botticelli's Birth of Venus arising bigger than life from the clam shell...

A year or so later, one Saturday I was in Tresslar's dimestore (for the young and uninitiated, a dimestore is where we shopped for inexpensive stuff long before the birth of Walmart, Kmart, the various dollar and big box stores) and my burgeoning hormones diverted me from my usual habit of browsing the Barbie dolls in the basement to the makeup section upstairs.  This was about a 4 or 6 foot long area on one side of an aisle that housed the store's cosmetics:  Tangee, Coty, Maybelline, Cornsilk, Pond's Angel Face, and some brand I can't remember the name of--like Duragloss or something like that.  I believe there was Cover Girl as well, but memory fails on other brand names.  

The choices for cosmetics back then were a drop in the ocean compared to today. That was the era of using Noxzema, Pond's Cold Cream, Jurgen's lotion; Phisohex (with its eventually banned carcinogenic hexachloraphene), SeaBreeze or Clearasil if you had acne-- Kirk's Castile, Dove or Ivory soaps if you didn't.  The cosmetics industry really began to explode in the late sixties when most of us babyboomers hit puberty and our moral culture did a 180 degree about-face.  As a generation, we not only ignored, but flung our parents' tightly wrapped mores in their faces. If we didn't become outright hippies and flower children extolling 'free love', while lighting up 'doobies', dropping acid or publicly copulating in the city parks, we at the very least wore our love beads and fringe and painted on our Twiggy lashes or Cher eyeliner while alternating our mini-, midi- and maxi-skirts with our elephant bell pants and platform clogs. What cultural chaos that time was!

At any rate, that day at the dimestore, I shelled out the great sum of $0.80 and bought, not one, but two lipsticks. Indeed, dimestore lipsticks ran about .35 to .40 cents each then. Can you even imagine?  The Collection Began. 

By the time I entered ninth grade, I had a secret shoebox hidden in the bottom of my closet with about 40 or so cheap lipsticks along with a pile of Teen, Tiger Beat and Seventeen magazines.  This was when white frosted lipstick was the London Look fashion, so all of these were some variation of this trend; all pinky, peachy or yellowish whites packed with the heavy frost indicative of the decade.  

My newborn fetish then turned to Brands.  I became a brand collector and really hit the 'big time' when I discovered a store in nearby Vincennes, IN (Jay's to be precise and undoubtedly long gone) that carried Revlon and Max Factor.  These were expensive---they were over a dollar each!  Of course, I had to have something from those famous lines.  In my rural naivete, I thought that was 'high end'.  THEN I discovered our two local drugstores carried some really high end stuff....one had Clairol (yes, back then Clairol made lipstick) and Helena Rubenstein, while the other (gasp of euphoria) carried Yardley!  Oh.My.God. What bliss!

Lipgloss was invented in the late sixties and was quite the innovation.  To this day, I still have a scent memory of that first clear Max Factor lipgloss which was in lipstick form.  When I sported it over at our neighbor's the next day, she informed me that it looked like I'd just eaten a greasy pork chop.  Oh, well, what did she know??  Undeterred, I am still a lipgloss lover today.

Beginning in the mid- to late sixties, I pored over Seventeen, Harper's Bazaar and Glamour magazines looking at the makeup jobs on all the models.  I thrilled over each new cosmetics ad released each month.  Cheryl Tiegs, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton, Verushka, Karen Graham, Marisa Berenson, Wilhelmina, Suzy Parker and her big sister Dorian Leigh, Patti Hansen, Cybill Shepherd, Christie Brinkley, Kim Alexis, Dale Haddon and many more were the fashion icons of the sixties and seventies whose faces I studied intently trying to suss out the makeup methods.  I looked at photo credits and to a smaller degree noted the work of fashion photographers Francesco Scavullo and Richard Avedon, and later on followed all the iconic makeup artists such as the late Kevin Aucoin (to me, the greatest makeup artist ever), even purchasing several of his wonderful instructional books. Sadly gone forever, but his impact lives on with all us Makeup Junkies.

Over the following forty years, my obsession with makeup never waned.  I'll be sixty this year (sob!) and though I had to seriously downsize my load of possessions in 2011 due to my DH and I taking up the full-time RVing retirement lifestyle, I still tote around about 5 or 6 cases of various cosmetics. One bag of lipstick, one of eyeshadows, one for foundations and powders and so on....  Today I'm a devoted "Geller Girl" and alternate her (Laura Geller) Balance n' Brighten with bareMinerals matte powder foundation and IT Cosmetics HD powders.  I love Signature Club A by Adrienne Arpel Vitamin C facial concoctions. (Can you tell I'm also a fan of QVC and HSN?)  And I've finally recently realized I do look much better without the heavy eyeliner and three shades of eyeshadow I've worn for years. Damn. There goes my sparkle fix. Less really is more at my age.  

I suspect there will come a day when my poor husband wakes up to find me passed away in bed, tightly clutching my favorite lipstick which he won't be able to pry out of my stone-cold, dead hand.  

"Boyo, just let me take it with me...I might need it on the other side."

Till next time,

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. - Ralph Waldo Emerson