Films and stars of the 1950s and 1960s are frequently referenced by today’s beauty writers and influencers, who often suggest that exuberant eye makeup was typical of the era. This rationale is supported by colourfully made-up eyes in advertisements and editorials in fashion magazines (fig.1), as evidenced in a 1969 edition of US Vogue: “Conventional eye makeup is nearly as outdated as is a feeling of slyness about tinting the hair. Spectacular colours ring the brightest eyes, Chinese pinks, deep-sea greens, polar whites.”[1]

Yet despite the beauty articles and this vivid evocation, colourfully enhanced eyes, one of the most creative areas of makeup, rarely feature in Hollywood films of the era where eye makeup is seldom brighter than barely-there brown.

Films and Fashion: Satch LaValley notes that films have always tended to reflect rather than initiate fashion, with stars crystallising ideas about how women want to look rather than setting trends.[2] Films set in the period contemporary to when they are made generally avoid fashion fads which might look outdated by the time of release. But worries about modishness were only one of the reasons that coloured eye makeup was kept off the screen in the 1950s and 60s. To set out some context, beauty makeup of the mid-twentieth century tended towards uniformity – both on and off-screen, so what Mulvey and Richards describe as the ‘ultra-sophisticated’ look of the 1950s, was only slightly removed from the composed 1940s face – predominantly matt, with red lips and defined eyebrows.[3] During this period stars were made-up under the direction of proprietorial makeup chiefs, who as Ronald Davis notes of MGM, ensured actresses looked as if they had just come from the beauty parlor at all times’.[4] Jean Porter who was under contract at MGM in the 1940s observed, ‘Our mouths were all made up the same […] our eyebrows were very much the same, our makeup was an awful lot alike’.[5]

As the 1950s morphed into the 1960s the look of actresses on-screen did begin to alter; foundation became more translucent, lip colour was toned down, brows more natural, and emphasis shifted towards the eyes. This was a period when thanks to the relatively cheap Eastman Colour filmstock, and the developing importance of television, colour became the predominant film medium. It’s notable however that although the female stars of these films might have artfully lined and shaped eyes, eyeshadow was almost never visibly coloured on-screen (fig.2).

Too-Much Colour: Coloured eyeshadow was certainly not excluded because of its newness. Kathy Peiss observes that fashionable New York women wore eyeshadow as early as 1915.[6] And by the 1920s products such as Elizabeth Arden’s Venetian Eye Sha-Do were available in ‘every conceivable shade’ to ‘enhance the colour and accentuate the depth of the eyes’[7] (fig.3). Eyeshadow’s connection with excitement and exoticism was compounded by stars such as Pola Negri and Theda Bara who wore extravagant dark eyeshadow which made them look sultry and heavy-lidded and drew on stereotypical ideas about how ‘foreign’ women looked. Marjorie Rosen describes Bara (who was born in Ohio) as wearing, ‘crude, exotic makeup [which personified] still-primitive but enticing notions of depravity and wanton lust’.[8]

Alongside eye shadow’s ‘decorative properties’ it also has a practical purpose. In his 1929 manual (aimed solely at white actors) MGM makeup chief Cecil Holland wrote: “The foundation or flesh colour on the face photographs nearly as light as the whites of the eyes. At a distance, without shading and lining […], the eyes would look like two holes burned in a blanket. The shading and lining form a frame for the eye.”[9] Because of the sensitivities of early orthochromatic black and white film stock, blue, especially light blue, tended to photograph as white. This would have limited the use of blue eyeshadow, but coloured eyeshadow was used – as a 1925 makeup manual describes: “The space between the eyelid and the eyebrow is variously colored, the object being to bring out the white of the eye and make the latter more brilliant. Color must be considered for its utility, that is, according to the way it photographs—dark, light or medium—and not for becoming reasons”.[10]

Makeup as feminine decoration was often regarded with disapproval, and too-obvious makeup was warned against in published advice. In 1932, makeup brand Princess Pat extolled the subtleness of their coloured eye shadows, warning that ‘too harsh the colour… too obvious the effect’, and in 1934 ‘New York’s favourite beauty advisor’, Nell Vinick, writing in Movie Classic magazine, warned against ‘the indiscriminate use of blue eyeshadow’.[11] In 1940, MGM makeup chief, Jack Dawn wrote: “eye shadow is for correction and never for attraction […] Don’t detract from the beauty of the eye itself by garish green, purple or lemon-yellow eye shadow. Try to use all make-up to emphasize your natural colouring, and this is especially true in the use of eye shadow.”[12]

It’s pertinent here to refer to David Batchelor’s writing in which he notes that colour is perceived as foreign, dangerous and trivial.[13] This is certainly true of attitudes to colour on-screen as evidenced by a 1935 article by Technicolor colour consultant Natalie Kalmus: “A super-abundance of color is unnatural, and has a most unpleasant effect not only upon the eye itself, but upon the mind as well […] we must constantly practise colour restraint.”[14]

As Rosalind Galt observes: ‘even in the moment of Technicolor’s ascendance, deep and bright colour was read in the language of suspicious, even criminal feminine seduction’.[15] This thought is confirmed by Dudley Andrew’s description of three-strip Technicolor as ‘purer than reality […] aggressive, almost whorish’.[16] These worries about too-much colour did not subside when the industry migrated to Eastmancolor in the 1950s, and overtly coloured eyeshadow continued to be rare on-screen.

The Problems of the Colourful Face: In a 1955 American Cinematographer article, Max Factor Jnr returned to the idea that coloured eyeshadow was problematic on-screen because of technical issues, because, as he explains, the Eastmancolor negative favours blue: “blue is a problem with most color negatives. But especially with Eastman, blue eyeshadow is not used except for certain special effects. A gray or brown eyeshadow, or the combination of the two, is used today. These colors will give a natural eyeshadow effect.” [17] Of course, the purpose of blue eyeshadow is to look blue and not ‘natural’ – which makes his suggestion that the shadow would be too blue quite curious. We should also note that coloured eyeshadow – often blue – was used on-screen in the 1950s and 1960s ­– but only to indicate certain types of women or scenarios. These include overtly theatricality women, such as the performers in Les Girls (George Cukor, 1957), of whom colour consultant George Hoyningen-Huene advised: “I suggest the chorus girls should be made up with theatrical make up, but sloppy, too much mascara, too much of everything, exaggerated, extreme. The colored girls made up with silver and violet eye shadow, orange lipstick.” [18]

And in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), Elsie (Marilyn Monroe) is resplendent in vivid blue eyeshadow as she waits backstage to greet royalty (fig.4). The second category is foreign/exotic women, for instance the numerous on-screen Cleopatras and biblical temptresses, who generally sport ornately coloured eyelids (fig.5).

These theatrical and exotic women are bound by the thread of dubious morality, and it is this above all else that qualifies a character to wear colourful makeup and showy eyeshadow. For example the ageing, depressed, semi-alcoholic, film star with a penchant for younger men, Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page) in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), and Maria Baretto (Lainie Kazan), a go-go dancer who propositions Tony Rome (Frank Sinatra) and ends up on a slab in the morgue, in Lady in Cement (1968) (fig.6). Colourful eye makeup is also used as an indicator of bad taste, often for comic effect. This is in evidence in A New Kind of Love (1961), in which boyish Samantha Blake (Joanna Woodward), experiments with different looks to try and become more feminine so she can snare her man before settling for a more archetypal blonde bombshell look. Her coloured eyeshadow is indicative of what the film suggests is the ridiculousness of fashion (fig.7).

The use of extravagantly coloured eyeshadow to exoticise white actresses (such as Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins as Cleopatra) did not mean that this bold makeup was necessarily used on the relatively few non-white actresses working in film and television in the era. The production code and societal attitudes to miscegenation meant actors of colour were rarely styled to look overtly sexually provocative on-screen in the 1950s and 1960s and there could be no suggestion that they might seduce white men. When coloured eyeshadow was occasionally used on darker skinned actresses, such as Diahann Carroll in The Split (1968), or Marcia McBroom in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) it was inexpertly applied and often looked chalky and dull (fig.8). It is also notable that rather than wearing the exuberant makeup that Hoyningen-Huene designed for them, the faces of the Black chorus girls in Les Girls appear miscoloured and tonally one note, on-screen (fig.9).

To Conclude: In an article about the history of blue eyeshadow, Rory Satran describes it as ubiquitous: ‘The very first Barbie made its debut in 1959 with the icy blue eyeshadow that was worn by everyone from Edie Sedgwick to housewives at the time’.[19] This of course was not reflected on-screen. However post-1980 distinctly blue eyeshadow has taken on a different self-reflexive role on-screen, often standing in for obvious makeup, and usually denoting a period non-specific kitschy cool, as in Buffalo ’66 (1998), or providing a fetishistic focus as in Blue Velvet (1986) (fig.10). In 2016 the exuberantly eyeshadowed The Love Witch, was, claims director Anna Biller, influenced by: Technicolor, Fassbinder, Sirk and Hitchcock, as well as Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale, who she says ‘both wore that kind of heavy eye makeup. […] It’s a classic ’60s glamour look’.[20] The film’s makeup is of course more fashion than film influenced, and Bardot and Cardinale did not wear coloured shadows on-screen in the 1960s. Yet with its loving homage the film does satirise the idea that extravagantly made-up women are dangerous and/or ridiculous (fig.10).

To tie things up we might say that vibrant makeup, rather than absent on-screen for technical reasons in the 1950s and 1960s, was instead vetoed by the patriarchal attitudes of Hollywood. The rationale being that overtly decorative makeup, which the fashion media paint as joyful and liberating, was instead conveyed by the morally conservative film industry as lascivious and ludicrous. 

About the author: Cathy Lomax has worked as a makeup artist and has an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. In 2023 she completed a PhD at Queen Mary University of London, her thesis title is ‘Making Up the Star: Makeup, Femininity, Race and Ageing in Hollywood, 1950-1970’. She is a practising artist and often uses film imagery in her paintings, which are exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2016 she won the Contemporary British Painting Prize, and she was an Abbey Painting Fellow at the British School at Rome in 2014. Recent publications include ‘Dorothy Dandridge, The Invisible Star: Racial Segregation in Hollywood Fan Magazines in the 1950s’ in Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Lies Lanckman, Sarah Polley (eds), Stars, Fan Magazines and Audiences: Desire by Design (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Contact:  lomaxcathy@mac.com

Endnotes:

[1] Cecil Holland, The Art of Make-Up for Stage and Screen (Hollywood: Cinematex Publishing Company, 1927), 34.

[2] Helena Chalmers, The Art of Make-Up for the Stage, the Screen and Social Use (New York/London: D Appleton,1925), 130-131.

[3] ‘For You – Exquisite Beauty’ Princess Pat promotional brochure (c.1932), 24, <https://cosmeticsandskin.com/booklets/princess-pat-you.php&gt; [accessed 4 November 2023]. Neil Vinick, ‘Lessons in Loveliness’, Movie Classic (December 1934), 13, 71.

[4] Carolyn Van Wyck, ‘Photoplay’s Own Beauty Shop’, Photoplay (May 1940), 91.

[5] David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).

[6] Natalie Kalmus, ‘Colour Consciousness’, Journal of the SEMPE (August 1935), 142, 147.

[7] Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 45.

[8] Dudley Andrew, ‘The Post War Struggle for Color’, inAngela Dalle Vacche & Brian Price (eds) Color: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 44.

[9] Factor, Max, ‘Standardisation of Motion Picture Makeup’, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, vol.28, no.1 (January 1937), 527.

[10] George Hoyningen-Huene to George Cukor, George Cukor Collection (Folder 162), Margaret Herrick Library (31 January 1956).

[11] Rory Satran, ‘blue eyeshadow rules pop culture — but who actually wears it?’ i-D (26 July 2017) <https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/59gbq3/blue-eyeshadow-rules-pop-culture-but-who-actually-wears-it&gt; [accessed 4 November 2023].

[12] Anna Biller Productions, ‘The Love Witch Press Kit’, (nd) <https://www.lifeofastar.com/lovewitchpresskit.pdf&gt; [accessed 9 November 2019].
Thea Basiliou ‘Q&A with the writer and director of The Love Witch, Anna Biller’ theabasiliou (26 August 2016) <https://theabasiliou.com/blogs/news/q-a-with-the-writer-and-director-of-the-love-witch-anna-biller&gt; [accessed 3 November 2023].

[13] Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The making of America’s beauty culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 168.

[14] ‘The Quest of the Beautiful’ Elizabeth Arden promotional brochure (1923). <https://cosmeticsandskin.com/booklets/arden-quest-23.php&gt; [accessed 4 November 2023].

[15] Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus, (London: Peter Owen, 1975), 60.

[16] Satch LaValley, ‘Hollywood and Seventh Avenue: The Impact of Period Films on Fashion’ in Edward Maeder (ed), Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film (Los Angeles: Thames and Hudson/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), 78.

[17] Mulvey and Richards Kate Mulvey & Melissa Richards, Decades of Beauty: The Changing Image of Women (London: Hamlyn, 1998), 146.

[18] Ronald L David, The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 225.

[19] Ibid, 226.

[20] ‘What Makes the Girl?’, US Vogue (15 October 1969), 128.