Vintage Powder Room

I have always been drawn to the Irresistible cosmetics ads because, well, they truly are irresistible. The colors are lush and the ads depict women who are individual beauties, not cookie cutter glamour girls.

It is rare to discover the identity of an artist working in cosmetics advertising—their art is generally unsigned and they are often employed by the container company or the cosmetics manufacturer who wants the focus placed on the product, not the artist.

The unique renderings of the women in the Irresistible ads are so compelling, though, that I had to seek out the artist. Fortunately the Internet has made such spur-of-the-moment quests possible and within a few keystrokes I had a name: Zoe Mozert.

Zoe Mozert worked as a commercial artist during the 1930s, creating the dreamy, romanticized images for Irresistible, and she was also one of the few women working as a pin-up artist.

Mozert was attractive enough to be a pin-up girl herself and frequently posed in front of her camera for early selfies, which enabled her to be the model for her own drawings.

Zoe eventually moved from the East Coast to Hollywood, where her portraits of stars such as Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, and Jean Harlow graced the covers of movie magazines. Mozert was also in demand as a movie poster artist. Her design for the 1937 comedy True Confessions might be her best, but my favorite is the one she created for the 1943 Howard Hughes horse opera The Outlaw, the film that introduced newcomer Jane Russell to audiences as the seductive Rio McDonald. Russell’s talent made her an actress, but I believe that it was Zoe’s depiction of her in the notorious poster that made her a star.

Produced during the 1930s, the bold colors and high concept design make this Hi-Hat face powder box a minor Art Deco masterpiece. In addition to being absolutely stunning, the box introduced me to products made specifically for women of color. Face powders for dark skinned women were produced in shades with exotic names like Parisian Lavender Nite, Harlem Tan, and Spanish Rose.

For me, the Hi-Hat box evokes the Harlem Renaissance, when legendary African American entertainers drew crowds of “swells,”—men in top hats and women in evening gowns—into Harlem’s nightspots.

The silhouetted chorus girls that encircle the Hi-Hat box are representative of the beautiful women who worked in Harlem nightclubs during the ‘20s and ‘30s. The hostesses at the Savoy were legendary; they could take a “dead hoofer” (bad dancer) and have them jitterbugging in no time. Not only were they talented, but they were reputed to be the most gorgeous ladies in Harlem.

From 1920 to 1955, Central Avenue was the L.A. equivalent of Harlem, where boogie woogie, jazz, and R&B were blasted from juke box speakers through the wee hours of the morning. The avenue was known as “the heart of Saturday night Los Angeles.” One of the classiest places to go for an evening’s revelry was the Dunbar Hotel, L.A.’s answer to the Savoy and Cotton Club in New York.  In its heyday the Dunbar was the hub of African American culture in L.A., and it offered entertainment from such artists as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway.

Imagine the dressing table of a habitue of Central Avenue —among her lipsticks, rouge pots, eye pencils and perfume atomizers, surely there would have been a box of Hi-Hat face powder.

I love old Hollywood, especially the B movies of the 1930s and 40s, so when I first saw this Monogram hair net in an online auction it reminded me of Monogram Pictures Studios.

The quintessential B movie factory of its era; Monogram churned out westerns, melodramas, mysteries and, most notably, series like Mr. Wong, starring Boris Karloff. The design on the Monogram envelope above looks like it could be a studio logo, and the woman depicted on the front with her au courant hairdo and makeup could be a starlet on the verge of major motion picture career.

Of course, Hollywood stardom has proved elusive to all but a fortunate few.  Of the actors who were making pictures in the 1930s, most were not on the payroll of a major studio like MGM or Warner Brothers. They were more likely working as extras or for a small studio, like Monogram.

One young Hollywood hopeful, Carmelita Geraghty, who graduated from Hollywood High School in 1919 and began her career as an extra, made many of her films for independent studios like Monogram. In 1931 she starred in a drama entitled “Forgotten Women.” Ironically, the trials and tribulations of women trying to succeed in Hollywood is the subject of the film.

A stunning girl with beautiful eyes, Carmelita was selected as one of the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers Baby Stars for 1924. By 1925 she seemed poised for great things; Carmelita had appeared in The Pleasure Garden, the first feature directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and would soon accept the role of Jordan Baker in the 1926 production of The Great Gatsby. Despite these successes Carmelita’s breakthrough role never came.

The unknown girl on the Monogram hair net envelope may have shared Carmelita’s fate and never have made it to stardom in the movies—or maybe not. I like to imagine her sitting for the portrait that will forever remind me of Hollywood during its heyday.

It is not possible for me to discuss the history of modern cosmetics without invoking the name of Max Factor. The man was a genius.

He created Pan-Cake, the make-up that made filming in Technicolor possible. He introduced the lipstick brush and indelible lip color that didn’t come off, even with smooching. He designed the famous “Cupid’s Bow” or “Bee-Stung” lips for stars like Clara Bow during the 1920s. In the early 1930s, when Joan Crawford went from playing wise-cracking, dance-crazy flappers to the more mature rolls for which she is now best known, it was Max who transformed her mouth from a cute pucker to the dramatic “Hunter’s Bow Lips,” which Crawford referred to as the “smear”. The look became her trademark.

Factor didn’t limit himself to creating cosmetics alone. He also invented devices like the Kissing Machine, which was used to test the longevity of lipstick formulas. In my opinion his most brilliant creation was the Beauty Micrometer, also known as the Beauty Calibrator.

At first glance the calibrator resembles a medieval torture device, but it wasn’t designed to inflict pain; it was made to measure the contours of a woman’s face and head within one thousandth-of-an-inch! Why were such measurements needed? Why to correct with cosmetics the imperfections of nature, of course.

Here are the ideal facial measurements according to Factor:
Nose: same length as the height of forehead
Eyes: separated by a space the width of one eye.

Even the most beautiful stars in Hollywood had imperfections by these standards, but with the deft application of light, shadow, and color, any actress could become perfection personified.

The Beauty Micrometer was featured the February 1933 edition of Popular Science magazine, and was also featured in a 1935 article in Modern Mechanix. With all the buzz, Factor hoped to place micrometers in beauty shops around the world, but his plan never came to fruition. As far as I know, only one micrometer was ever constructed. Which is why, in 2009, I was stunned to discover that the machine had been placed in an auction!

To own such a rare piece of beauty and cosmetics history I would have been willing to do almost anything, but with a preliminary estimate of from $10,000 to $20,000 I feared the micrometer would never be mine. Crackpot ideas for making a quick buck filled my brain. I considered dozens of schemes, most of which would probably have landed me in jail. Then cold, harsh reality finally set in: I would have to watch the auction and hope that whoever was lucky enough to win the micrometer would treat it with care.

And yet, the auction ended differently than I’d anticipated. The one-of-a-kind Max Factor Beauty Calibrator did not meet the auction reserve! So, what happened to the calibrator? I phoned the Hollywood Museum and they assured me that it is now where it belongs: currently on display where Max Factor himself once worked.