I HAVE MY grandmother to thank for my life-long love affair with beauty products. She was always very beautiful even as an old lady in her eighties, with a white curly perm, she still had a girlish sparkle that belied her years. In her youth, she had thick, long chestnut hair that hung in big, fat waves down her back and smiling eyes, a clear aquamarine shade, which kept their colour almost up until the day she passed away, aged eighty-four.
My grandmother had more access to beauty products than most women. Her husband, my grandfather Thomas Burrows, had a chemist’s shop in Beeston, Nottinghamshire. He sold beauty creams and cosmetics and during the war, my mother remembers him sitting for hours at the kitchen table making up ‘Liquid Stockings’, which looked like bottles of gravy, but were welcomed by all the women who were stationed at the nearby army depot.
As a young child, I don’t remember Grandma wearing much make-up, but I do remember her sitting at her large, Edwardian dressing table, which stood proudly in front of her bedroom window. Her dressing table was the most exciting place in the world to me, with its mysterious bottles and jars and little blue-and-white patterned pots, containing all sorts of secrets, though in reality probably just held hairgrips.
Curiosity always got the better of me, as I opened the little drawers, expecting to find hidden treasures, but only finding a large fluffy powder puff and the tiniest little book of tissue thin paper – Papier Poudre – that she had used for years to blot any trace of a shiny nose but which I had always secretly thought would make a better dolly’s notebook.
There was a tiny blue cardboard box that contained Bourjois blusher – a little bit of rouge, as she called it – which she applied to the apples of her cheeks with cotton wool to give her pale skin a peachy glow.
In the fifties she wore foundation – Revlon’s Touch & Glow and Max Factor’s Crème Puff – and stayed loyal to those brands to the day she died. There was a small round white box of Coty loose powder with dandelions painted on it, which I thought was very pretty, and always wished she’d hurry up and use it all, so I could use the box to keep things in.
Grandma used Pond’s Cold Cream Cleanser for all her skincare needs and used it for just about everything. There were no anti-ageing creams or potions, her only advice about avoiding lines and wrinkles was to always protect your face from the sun and to avoid frowning – at all costs.
My grandmother had the most beautiful skin, a soft, velvety complexion that some women would pay hundreds of pounds to achieve these days. Through my work as a beauty writer, I have met many of the world’s top facialists, women with ‘magic fingers’ and waiting lists and highly successful product ranges. One of these skincare queens, Eve Lom, has a world-famous regime based on daily cleansing with an oily cleanser and then rinsing it off several times with a muslin cloth. The Eve Lom Cleanser is a bestseller, adored by celebrities and beauty industry insiders and her flawless complexion is proof that she follows her own tried and tested routine. My grandmother’s own cleaning regime involved rubbing in a few dollops of Pond’s Cream and removing it with a flannel, soaked in warm water. She would finish it off with a few splashes of cold water and she never, ever used moisturiser.
Nobody in the family ever remembers her wearing any eye make-up, although she would have been able to have her pick of the chemist’s shop counters. Her own eye colour was so unusual – you would need coloured contact lenses today to achieve the exact shade of turquoise – that she never needed any eyeshadow or mascara. She wore lipstick – but never in an obvious way. There was always a well-worn stub of scarlet lipstick in her dressing table drawer, which she applied with her finger, to produce the effect top make-up artists like Bobbi Brown describe today as a ‘stain’. Her technique obviously worked a treat as we were never left with red lipstick kisses on our cheeks when we went to visit her.
She never wore perfume, but she always kept a bottle of Yardley’s lavender water on her dressing table, which she dabbed on her pulse points on special occasions. Occasionally, if she fancied a change, she would switch to 4711 Eau de Cologne, a scent that reminded her of her own father. He used to put a couple of drops of 4711 on to his freshly laundered handkerchiefs, invigorated by the clean, citrussy scent and ever after, the smell always made her feel close to her father.
Strangely it wasn’t either scent that reminds me of my grandmother, decades after she died. Instead the most memorable smell for me was the unmistakable aroma of TCP. She was a germphobic all her life and used to gargle religiously with it every day to keep the germs at bay.
She had an ebony dressing table set that as a child, I was convinced was worth a fortune, with her initial, F, embossed on her hairbrushes, clothes brush and mirror in silver.
My grandmother bought me my first lipstick, as long as I promised not to tell my mother. It was a tiny bullet of Outdoor Girl’s Old Wine, which was a wicked, glossy red-black colour and I liked to think smelled of wine as well. It made me feel instantly grown up and quite naughty, so at the age of ten I discovered make-up’s magical ability to transform and cheer you up. Several hundred lipsticks later, that feeling has stayed with me ever since.
Recently I was researching on the Internet for my weekly Daily Mail beauty column and came across a website which had two whole pages devoted to retro health and beauty products. What’s more, all of these products are still going strong and can be easily bought with a couple of clicks. And there they all were – all the secrets of my grandmother’s dressing table – Pond’s Cold Cream Cleanser, Max Factor’s Crème Puff, 4711 Eau de Cologne and even Papier Poudre, all for just a few pounds each.
It’s incredible that in an industry worth billions of pounds, these products have not only survived, but have played their part in beautifying generations of women. Perhaps it’s because they are all inexpensively priced, or more importantly, perhaps it’s because they all did and continue to do exactly what they say they will. Which when it comes to beauty products, really is the only thing we want to know.
Elsa McAlonan is a former editor of Woman’s Own and Woman’s Journal and now writes a weekly beauty column, Beauty Confidential, for the Daily Mail.