Nowadays, all one has to do is walk down the beauty aisles of any store to see that there are literally thousands of products out there for every imaginable purpose you could think of! Take for example cleansers: they may be plain soap, foaming, for sensitive skin, for oily skin, for dry skin, for combination skin, cream cleansers, cleansing wipes, cleansers with added vitamins, cleansers with exfoliating beads. . .) You get the idea! And that's just cleansing! What about day lotions, night creams, repairing serums, pimple treatments, eye creams, exfoliating scrubs, masks (or masques, if you want to be fancy about it!), toners, etc. etc. etc.! It's overwhelming, confusing, and can be expensive (I know I'm not the only one who has spent money on tons of products I don't like or don't work, only to go out and buy a new one to try).
Now back in the 1950's, there were still many skincare choices available, but it wasn't quite so overwhelming, and you had your friendly neighborhood cosmetic counter lady to help you with your purchase (for good or bad!). It was basically a choice between brands of the beauty standards (cleansing or cold cream, skin refresher, skin-food or emollient) and a few homemade concoctions thrown in for the glamorous housewife on a budget.
Back in the day, makeup contained oils. And even moisturizers had oil and lanolin. And so they used oil to take off oil (many cold creams for example contain mineral oil). And you think to yourself, goshdarnit, if I put that much oil on my face, every pore on my face would erupt into one big nasty pimple! (My generation - I'm only 30, y'all - was brought up to shrink away from oil. Oil is bad! Put oil on your face?? And risk the breakout of all breakouts??!! NEVER!!) But then you look at the luminous complexions of stars of the time, and think, well heck, it worked for them (but then of course they are movie stars, hand-picked for their perfect features and superior genetics, right?)
Regardless, I'm going to give this routine the old college try!
Now I will say, for starters, that I do not have what one would refer to as flawless skin. I kind of just have your average skin (had a lot of breakouts as a teenager and into my twenties, oily t-zone, still rocking a few blemishes and redness at 30), so this whole apply-oil-to-my-face thing is counterintuitive, and like I said I was brainwashed as a youth to hate oil. But I will nonetheless give it a try for 30 days to see what happens.
This is what my morning and night routines will consist of for the next 30 days, and is based off of various routines I have researched from the 1950's:
Morning:
- No washing of face
- Application of a skin freshener
- Application of emollient (moisturizer)
- Makeup
Night:
- Application of cold cream and removal with tissue
- Wash face with soap and water
- Application of emollient (moisturizer)
Over the next few days I will include posts on skin fresheners, soaps, cold creams, and emollients of the time, as well as the ones I am choosing to use in my experiment (obviously many of the brands that were once popular are no longer made, and if they still are, fewer still have the same formulation, so I will try to use the modern equivalent). I will also include how they are used.
Over the month, I will also scrounge up some of those homemade concoctions of the thrifty housewife that I mentioned earlier, and will test them out as well.
So stay tuned for the 1950's skincare regime project!
