The compact, the lipstick, the powder puff: how cosmetics left the dressing table and went out into the street.
For the nineteenth century, beauty was a private ritual performed at a dressing table behind a closed door. The 1920s put it in a handbag. The powder compact, small enough to open in public and mirrored inside, made touching up a visible, modern gesture, and visible color respectable at last.
Coty's Air-Spun powder, Maybelline's cake mascara, and Tangee's lipstick were built for that portability, sold as objects a woman carried and used in the open. The compact is the hinge on which cosmetics turn from something applied in secret to something worn in daylight, a shift the advertising documents in real time.
A cake of mascara named for the founder's sister democratizes the darkened lash.
Maybelline ›Coty's Air-Spun powder and the mirrored compact make touching up a modern, visible gesture.
Coty ›
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