Vintage 1950s beauty products

Today's vintage ephemera includes more ladies' beauty products.  The asterisk on the 1955 Gayla bobby pin packaging below fascinated me...  What was simulated?  Turns out these bobby pins have simulated rubber tips!  

Gayla Hold-Bob Bobby Pins with Flexi-Grip and simulated rubber tips

I've posted hairnet packaging before.  This Lovely Lady package is not as colorful as the others, but I like the image, and I love the company name:  Sta-Rite Ginnie-Lou Inc. Hyphenation at its finest.

Notice how the blond woman on the Gayla package and the woman on the Lovely Lady package are both looking downward? Were the designers going for demure? Flirty? Subservient? 

Lovely Lady Hair Net package 

Also notice that the woman on the Lovely Lady Hairnet package does NOT appear to be wearing a hairnet... whereas the ladies in the photograph below are rocking the hairnets!

Lunch ladies?

More vintage hairnet packaging is here, in case you missed it.

Vintage women's fashion

Vintage magazine ads and vintage sewing patterns are great sources of information about fashion over the years.  These images from the 1940s suggest that women wore hats and white gloves, dresses featured decorative trim and often had pockets, heels were high, and the ideal waist was tiny.  These tiny waists are interesting because movie stars in that day had more ample figures, with a few exceptions such as Vivien Leigh. Was this the start of a shift towards today's unhealthy ideal of an ultra thin female body?

Women's fashions from the 1940s

1940s fashions

Beauty advice booklets from the 1960s

Women who wanted beauty advice in 1963 could choose from a huge catalog of 25-cent booklets published by the Bonomo Culture Institute.  The creator of these handy pocket manuals was Joe Bonomo, a body-builder (Mr. Modern Apollo of 1921) and self-proclaimed "International Authority on Beauty, Health, Diet and the Self-Improvement of Face and Figure."

No. 13 in the Bonomo Pocket Manual series was a NEW! Bonomo Beauty Ritual: How to Beautify Your Bust Contour, featuring the home course techniques.  This little 3"x5" book boasts 64 easy-to-follow pages completely illustrated with photographs, diagrams and charts.  It includes 41 separate exercises for building your bust.

Bonomo Handy Pocket Manual #1 was "Make-up -- and LIVE!" which promised Beauty in 10 Easy Steps, including some very interesting facial exercises (scroll down).

The lovely woman who modeled these facial exercises may have developed some new wrinkles after this photo shoot.

An outfit called Happiness Books of Stanford, Connecticut, also published pocket-sized books with beauty hints.  "Hairdo Secrets" cost 25 cents and had 64 pages, just like the Bonomo books.  It's not clear who copied whom.

 

Some classic tips and llustrations from the Hairdos booklet:

The 1960s woman holding a sign might be fun to use on a greeting card or scrapbook layout. If you want edited versions of any of the other images, just let me know in the Comments.

Don't forget to splurge, ladies!

  

Vintage packaging: 1950s ladies and their hairnets

Hairnets were not just worn by the Lunch Ladies immortalized in Saturday Night Live skits. Many women of the 1940s and 1950s went to the beauty shop once a week to have their hair "done," then slept in hairnets every night to keep their "do" in place until the next visit. My grandmother did this, and my 81-year-old mother still does!


I just love packaging that features vintage drawings of women... the hair styles, the makeup, the clothing -- fascinating!  The Barinet and Jac-o-net packaging uses glamorous women, and the Set Snug and Forma brands would seem to appeal to the girl-next-door type.  Want to bet that the Barinet and Jac-o-net brands were more expensive?

Packaging has changed a lot over the years.  Looks like there was a single package design for the brand, with the name of the color added in the upper left corner.  (No matter that the Forma dark brown hairnet package showed a blond, and the grey Set Snug package shows a brunette and a redhead.)  Only the woman on the Jac-o-net package image has the same color hair as the hairnet in the package! A modern-day hair color line might feature 20+ color choices, each with its own matching packaging -- and none of them would be aught dead using plain vanilla names such as "light brown" or "grey."


How do you use ephemera like this in your artwork? I like the trend that has  straight-laced looking apron-clad moms making outrageous statements, such as "After a couple of Vodka Tonics, I just love to vacuum!"  Those always make me laugh. 


Below is a spread from my (under construction) "Remains of the Day" journal, a journal made with scraps and ephemera. I sewed a Barinet hairnet package into my ROD book as a pocket for journaling.  

How are you using ephemera in your art projects?  I'd love to hear from you in the Comments.  


Enjoy!