How Hollywood lent its stars to the beauty counter, and invented celebrity endorsement at industrial scale.
In the 1930s the studios discovered that a face under contract was an asset that could be lent. Lux Toilet Soap signed the contract players and printed the tally on the page: nine out of ten screen stars use Lux. The reader was not asked to trust a chemist, but to borrow the glamour of a name she already loved.
Max Factor made the mechanism literal, calling itself the make-up of the stars and selling the exact product used on set. The Technicolor close-up had made a complexion a national concern, and the studios and the beauty houses met in the fan magazines, where a star's endorsement and a soap's advertisement sat on facing pages.
It is the template a century of influencer marketing still runs on, visible in the record at the moment it was assembled.
Lux Toilet Soap signs the studios' contract players and turns their fame into a tally on the page.
Lux ›Max Factor sells the exact Pan-Cake worn on set, and the studio face reaches the vanity.
Max Factor ›Tangee frames a painted mouth through the glamour and resolve of the women on screen.
Tangee ›
Real public-domain advertisements the engine identified for these houses. Click any page to read it at the Internet Archive.
Open these houses in the record →