Vintage Powder Room

One of the biggest advantages to blogging about my interest in vintage beauty products over the past several years has been having sellers contact me about rare items for sale. For example, on my birthday four years ago I received an email from a man in upstate New York; he had found me via my Vintage Powder Room page and thought I might be interested in a manufacturer’s catalog of face powder, rouge, and lipstick boxes. He described the 96-page catalog as c. 1922 with a brown paper cover and soft spine. He told me that the book was in excellent condition and that it contained approximately 300 images, with every other page printed in color and many with gold or metallic ink. He had just acquired the catalog that day and while researching it he came across my blog. He sent me a picture of the cover of the book and while it didn’t look like much, the pictures he attached of some of the inside illustrations let me breathless. I immediately offered to buy the catalog; it was my birthday present to myself.

E.N. Rowell Co., Inc. manufactured and designed some of the most exquisite cosmetics packaging of the 1920s. This slim volume was meant for cosmetics company representatives who were shopping around for the perfect containers for their products. Rowell’s pitch highlighted the quality of the company’s boxes and the excellence of their designs.

Since I purchased it, the catalog has become an invaluable reference tool. While I was excited to discover that I own many of the boxes depicted in its pages (including the Nylotis face powder box), it also reminds me that there are hundreds more face powder boxes I have yet to find. My quest continues.