Imagine, you are a woman living in America in the early 1940s. The war is underway and you are doing everything you can to help the war effort. You are busy knitting socks, baking cakes and generally helping out where you can. You wish you could join the services with your daughter, but you have younger children to look after. You do your bit though, and after you discovered she had been issued a tube of lipstick 'to keep morale up', you went out and purchased one too. After all, you have to do your bit!
When I took this lipstick holder to show the children, the girls, and the mothers who saw it, were really very taken with it. It is a very attractive little piece, and also very compact, yet it even manages to provide a mirror to apply the lipstick with. Compared to modern lipsticks which you often need to carry a separate mirror for, the girls thought this was a great idea! They were confused though that it didn’t have a push up or twist mechanism like modern lipsticks. It was very surprising to them to learn that lipstick would have been purchased separately from the holder and then put inside.
Lipstick, as we know it today dates back to the 1800s, but the history of lipstick itself dates back far further. Lipstick also has quite a chequered history. Up to 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia women were using various materials to colour their lips, including crushed up semi-precious stone, rust, clay and even seaweed. In Egypt we know that they used a highly poisonous mix of bromine mannite and iodine to add a deep purple colour to their lips. The mix was so poisonous that it is sometimes called ‘the kiss of death’. Cleopatra, who was Egypts queen in 51-30BC also coloured her lips, but she didn’t use the poisonous mix, instead using a combination of beeswax, crushed up ants and fish scales to create her lipstick. The fish scales added a shine to her lipstick and in fact they were even used into the 20th century to add that shimmer!
Lipstick was popular with women right through until the Middle Ages, but then it fell out of favour, seen as appropriate only for women of the lower classes. Queen Elizabeth 1 popularised lipstick again when she wore it to highlight her pale, powdered features, but its popularity was again short lived and in the 17th century the Church decided lipstick was evil, the work of the devil. In 1770 the English parliament even passed a law which suggested that any woman who wore lipstick was a witch! It wasn’t until the 1850s when makeup like lipstick began to come back into favour, though wearing it could still be dangerous with toxic materials like lead often used in it. By the 1890s makeup like lipstick was socially acceptable and toxic materials were no longer used as widely, though ground up fish scales, insects and even precious stones would continue to be used for colour and shine for a time to come. Throughout the 20th century lipstick was used to accentuate the lips, add to femininity and even during World War 2 to boost morale! Indeed, in America during the war lipstick was actually issued to women in the forces. In the 1920s swivel lipstick had been invented, but for many, lipstick continued to be purchased in a tube and put into holders like the one I showed the children.
