(image from soundingsonline.com) I was doing some digging on Ultra Sheen cosmetics after purchasing a great vintage display for it and stumbled across the name Bill Pinkney, who had a brief stint as a marketing executive for the company. As... Read more →

I admit I purchased this object without fully understanding what it was. I couldn't unearth any ads for Opaline1 and very little exists about the company. There were a couple calls for De Baranta-Windsor salespeople in 1898 for totally different... Read more →

Discussing various styles of face paint1 worn by different Indigenous peoples is critical for a better understanding of the history of cosmetics and recognizing that makeup outside of the modern industry exists. For many people across the globe, cosmetics beyond... Read more →

Consumers have come to expect a good measure of dishonesty in makeup marketing. But given the lack of strict regulations for cosmetics labeling in the U.S. ("clean" beauty, anyone?), companies have considerably more freedom to concoct some rather outlandish claims,... Read more →

I forget what I was looking for when I stumbled across beautician and stylist Eddie (Eadward) B. Deason (1921-1976). Like Blanche Hunter, Deason's story is incomplete. But the few things I could find are definitely worth highlighting. Deason opened several... Read more →

CW/TW: racist imagery and slurs for Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and Black populations as well as those of Middle Eastern descent. It's been nearly a decade since I discussed one of the many ugly parts of the beauty industry: cultural appropriation... Read more →

It's another incomplete history, but I wanted to highlight the few bits I was able to locate about the makeup line founded by supermodel Naomi Sims, born on this day in 1948.1 (This post will not cover her collection of... Read more →

On average, the Museum receives one inquiry a week. It doesn't seem like much, but if it's something that can't be identified easily or a broad question about historic trends, they can take up quite a bit of time. Here... Read more →

Color coordination is just one of many facets of the vast and complex makeup-fashion relationship. This post will attempt to outline the trajectory of this concept from the 1920s through the early 1960s and examine how it was being marketed,... Read more →

I was skimming through vintage copies of Ebony magazine at archive.org, hoping to find some interesting and not widely known-about Black beauty pioneers. I struck paydirt with the February 1949 issue, which profiled a TV makeup artist named Blanche Hunter.... Read more →