MANY AN “EXPERT“ advises working girls to keep make-up to a bare minimum. An office, they say, isn’t the place to razzle and it isn’t the place to dazzle, and the only thing to smell like is a bar of Fels Naptha (no Nuit de Longchamps, Joy, or any of that nonsense). Well, I’m convinced the experts must all be left-at-home wives who, if they had their way, would also have office girls wear shrouds and nettles. Of course you don’t keep your make-up at the office to a bare minimum! For the love of heaven an office is where the men are!
Men like girls to look natural. Of course they do, but that doesn’t mean truly natural—eyebrows strolling straight across the nose-bridge or not showing up anywhere (some girls don’t have any, poor darlings). Au naturel would mean saffron-colored skin, mop-water colored hair ... really, I can’t go on!
Advising a girl to keep her make-up to a bare minimum is usually hooked in with that nonsense about letting your beautiful soul shine through—especially if you are a plain girl. Fooling with make-up is supposed to be only for narcissistic beauties. The truth is, a plain girl frequently has a wretchedly unattractive soul but her soul takes on luster when she uses make-up or has her nose fixed or puts on her wig. I know all about what fixing can do for the average girl. When I’m on a television show in my padded bra, capped teeth, straightened nose, Pan-Cake, false eyelashes and wig I may not be natural, but I’m absolutely glorious!
If you want to feel princessy and have things happen to you at the office, I suggest you wear plenty of make-up but put it on naturally. (I’ll tell you how.) If you are only dabbing on the merest dab of powder and daubing on the merest daub of lipstick to wear to work, you should face it. You’re hiding out! You’re afraid to be a beauty! Wearing make-up does put you “on” all right. Men notice you, men strike up conversations with you, and men even get the idea you’re interested in them and they respond. You can’t lie low and be squashy and safe and comfortable and unnoticed the way an un-made-up girl can.
All right, how do you get the “naturally” beautiful look that men love? You get it by using a foundation, make-up, two kinds of rouge, lipstick, eye shadow, eye liner, eyebrow pencil, mascara and powder. And I’m going to tell you right now how to use them “naturally.”
This is the works. From beginning to end. It was taught to me by Jane Rasché at the Max Factor make-up salon in Hollywood, where I have often seen Jane and her boss, Hal King, transform the faces of fifty-year-old frumpy ladies into quite pretty faces, as well as take ten years off of celebrities! If you’re just a regular plain girl, these particular techniques can make you radiant.
Perhaps you feel you can’t handle the entire procedure every day* before you go to the office. (I don’t see why not. You could get up at 5:00 A.M. and go to bed right after sundown!) It is possible to get in most of the steps every morning but just not do them as painstakingly as if you had lots of time.
1. Start with a clean face. Liquid cleansers are great. Cold cream has to melt on your face to get to the stage liquid cleanser is when you pour it from the bottle. That makes cold cream slower. Soap and water are thorough but soapy ... and drying.
2. Pat on a lotion or astringent. This feels nice; that’s the main thing you can say about it. It is also supposed to close pores, and you don’t want to go running around with your pores open! Of course you don’t.
3. Put on a moisturizer (I’ll tell you about a great inexpensive one in a minute). The moisturizer is said to keep the moisture in your face all day, and I’m sure if it does that, that’s good. I really don’t know. Anyway, it makes your face creamy-smooth to start putting your make-up on top of, and a moisturizer feels nice to your skin, too.
4. Put on your favorite make-up (liquid, cake, whatever). Smooth it over your face everywhere. Don’t be a scaredy cat about under the eyes. That area’s part of your face too. The idea is to smooth on a second skin. Blend the make-up down to just below the jaw-line, not clear over the throat.
5. If you have heavy shadows under your eyes, use Max Factor’s Erace over this area. Choose one shade lighter than your own skin tone because you want to lighten the shadows. Also use Erace on nose-to-mouth lines.
6. Dab fluid rouge high on cheekbones just under eyes. Blend it across these bones with your fingers and down just a little on the cheeks, but don’t have a lot of rouge in the fleshy part of your cheeks unless your face is very full. Rouge causes shadows and will make you look sunken-cheeked if placed too low.
7. Now powder over everything with translucent powder. Your make-up will have supplied the color for your face. Powder over lips and eyelids too because this sets your make-up. If you use loose powder, transfer it to a bottle with holes in the top and shake it out onto a puff or cotton ball. Powder lashes too. All powdered? Brush powder from your face with a powder brush.
8. Draw a ribbon of eye shadow from the inner corner of your eye to the outer edge, tilting the shadow up just a bit at the outer corner so your eyes won’t look droopy. Stroke the shadow close to the lashes. Shadow looks best on most girls when it goes up over only half the lid. You can experiment with it all the way up to the eyebrow, however, and look at yourself.
If your eyes are deep set, a light shade of eye shadow—pale blue or green—will bring your eyes out to meet the man who’s looking at you. If your eyes aren’t sunk in very deeply, a darker shade of eye shadow will give them depth. If you use shadow from a tube, powder over it to set the color. Powdered eye shadow from a bottle is already “set.”
9. Use a tiny brush to outline your eyes with eye liner. Start from the center of the upper lid and, staying fiercely close to the lash, draw a line to the outer corner of the eye. Then go back and fill in from the center of the lid to the inner eye. Use the side of the brush to do this—you’ll get in trouble trying to use the very tip. When the brush is practically dry, line your lower lashes. You want only a breath of color for a shadowy effect. Go under the lashes, dear. Don’t daub on top of them.
Fluid eye liner which comes in a little bottle usually dries up rather quickly. Max Factor’s Black Pan-Cake is great for eye liner and doesn’t. Moisten an eye-liner brush with water and just run it over the cake of Black Pan-Cake as though it were mascara. One cake—$1.50 plus tax—should last easily a hfetime. I sometimes brush on eyebrows with it instead of using a pencil. Any Max Factor counter should be able to order Black Pan-Cake for you if they don’t carry it. (No, this company doesn’t pay me.)
10. This is the point where you put on false eyelashes if you’re wearing them. The secret to putting them on without trauma is to get just the merest whisper of a line of the glue across the top edge of the lash. After the lashes are on, line the upper eyelid again with liner. Just paint right over the strips of lash—it won’t hurt them.
11. With a razor blade sharpen your eyebrow pencil to a wedge-shape (not round like from the pencil sharpener). Now draw tiny little strokes that look like hairs to fill out your eyebrows. The part of the brow closest to the nose should be the lowest point. The very center of your eye is the highest—you can go a little heavy with pencil there. Then pencil on out to the outer edge of the eye. You can lift a little at the edge if you like. Never curve the brow downward or you’ll look like a beagle.
All eyebrow pencils are good as far as I know, but I’m mad about a pencil you buy in the stationery store—an Eagle Chemi-seal #315 veri-black. The color is actually a soft charcoal grey that’s very flattering to brunettes. The pencils are seventy-five cents for a box of a dozen. Six girls could go in together and own two pencils apiece for just thirteen cents a girl.
12. Apply mascara. Brush it on top of the lash as well as under the lash and add mascara to false lashes too. It combines fake and real to look aZZ-real.
I think a regular big eyebrow brush about half the size of a toothbrush (instead of the teeny-tiny brush that come with the product) is best for applying mascara. I also like cake mascara because you can work up a really good case of eyelashes! While you do one eye, the other lashes will dry from their application. You can do as many as six applications to each eye if you want to build really beautiful lashes (and get to work at twelve noon!). A working-girl friend of mine washes everything off her face but mascara and leaves her “lashes” on from one month to the next. “You protect your nails with three coats of polish,” she says. “Why not your lashes?” She may have a point. Anyway, it’s fun to go to bed with big, black fringy Elizabeth Taylor eyelashes when you’re used to seeing yourself with naked Elizabeth I eyes at bedtime.
13. Put on your lipstick. Since “colorless” lips are chic, you may want to outline your lips with a darker shade—and use a brush, for goodness sake—then fill in with a lighter shade. If your mouth goes down at the corners, give it a bit of a lift with a tiny upward line of your brush. You know all about drawing in a completely different mouth than the one you own—beefing up here, minimizing there. Of course you do!
14. For the royal coup to make you look like a glowing angel, dust cheekbones ever so lightly—but lightly—with dry rouge stroked on with a powder brush. Try it! It looks heavenly.
15. Lily gilding: If you are not using Erace or another product to cover under-eye smudges and they still seem to show a bit through your make-up, take a %” brush, dip it in your make-up foundation and paint lightly over the shadows. Do you realize what a wicked woman you are? You are painting your face—and is it ever fun and flaw-hiding!
16. Final Touch! Dampen a small silk sponge with water and gently pat it all over your face. This gives you an alive little glow no matter how much make-up you’re wearing . . . voila, the natural look!
These instructions work with anybody’s cosmetics. As a matter of fact, I find it hard to buy bad ones, including those from the dime store. I won’t bore you with any more of my personal choices. I will tell you about just one that does the work of at least three so that you can save maybe twenty dollars a year. A little jewel called Lubri-Derm (made by Texas Pharmacal Company and usually located in the drugstore) is a hand and body lotion, a great moisturizer (as good as any high-priced ones I’ve ever used) to go under make-up, and can also be worn overnight as a light night cream. A roomy pint bottle is about $2.50.
I was going to give you a recipe for making your own cold cream to keep in your desk drawer. After assembling all the ingredients and locking myself in the kitchen for three days, I got a yield of one tiny jar, two scorched palms, and I don’t know how many naughty oaths to my record for a cash outlay of $3.89. Obviously it wasn’t worth it! I am jotting down the recipe for a dandy mask, however, that will send you radiant and wantable to the office if you use it the night before.
Mix ½ box rosemary leaves—the dried ones—with three cups of water in a saucepan. Boil until the color of strong tea. (It turns green at first and then brown.) Strain and discard leaves. Store liquid in the refrigerator.
To use: Mix three teaspoons of liquid with one egg white, stirring to incorporate thoroughly. Apply to face. Leave on thirty minutes. Wash off with cold water. Use twice or three times weekly to refine large pores and improve skin texture. Immediate results are a better skin tone. Three weeks will show a noticeable difference in texture and clarity.
I don’t think most offices care what color polish you wear—Ape Red, Peach Berserk or Mad Mauve—as long as your nails are beautifully cared for. Any shade of peeling polish is the wrong shade.
If your nails are too scruffy to take polish, take heart. . . and take liver! Weak, snivelly little nails grow hard as boards (and men play right into your hands) if you get lots of liver into your system. Other good things happen inside you and outside you, too. It’s a mighty rough go eating all the fresh liver (aaggghh!) you need to be super-healthy and beautiful—at least a pound a week—but there’s a way out. You can drink powdered liver in fruit or tomato juice. I don’t think you can continue to do anything very long if the potion gags, you, but powdered liver in the following recipes is almost tasty. (If your office has an ice box, you could whip these up every afternoon. They only take a minute.)
Start with one heaping teaspoon, work up to three or more, of powdered yeast-liver in bottom of a giant old-fashioned glass. Sprinkle in seasoned salt. Squeeze in a big squeeze of fresh lemon. (One lemon should last for four cocktails.) Mash the lemon juice and powdered yeast-liver together. Fill up the glass with tomato juice. Stir and mash some more until the powder is all dissolved. Eat with a cracker—and grow splendid nails!
Start with one heaping teaspoon, work up to three or more, of powdered yeast-liver in bottom of old-fashioned glass. Add a heaping teaspoon of frozen orange juice concentrate (or any other flavor). One can will last a week or so. Squeeze in a big squeeze of fresh lemon juice. Mash all these things around. Fill up glass with canned grapefruit or pineapple juice. Stir and mash some more until the powder is all dissolved. Here come the fingernails!
If you can’t find powdered yeast-liver in a store, and I haven’t seen it very many places, order it from: Gladys Lindberg, 3946 Crenshaw Boulevard, Los Angeles 8, California. A one-pound jar is $1.75, two-and-a-half-pound jar—$3.95, five-pound jar—$7.85. It lasts a long time.
Now that beehives and bouffants are practically out, I guess we don’t have to argue about whether they are appropriate for the office! I think any hair style that is flattering and makes you feel scrumptious is appropriate except long hanging-down hair. (Pearson’s Law of Abundant Affinity states: The girl who wears too much of anything usually has not had time to keep all of it clean, and that usually goes for long hair.)
If you don’t have particularly pretty hair, may I remind you again of a remedy you’ve been hearing about since baby days. Brushing. Just brush and brush and brush. You really don’t need a comb except for setting. A small brush should be in your desk drawer.
A brunette who has always had thin hair says, “If I had to choose between my car and my wig, the car would have to go!” It isn’t to be believed what a beautiful wig can mean in your life. Though dreadfully expensive if they’re good, wigs are often prettier than a girl’s own hair. Shop hard. Even the $250 ones vary in quality.
If you’re a wig girl, I suppose you have to go through buying a different color than your own hair—it’s such fun to shock people. But do you really want to look like Harpo Marx? That’s the effect of blonde hair on most deep-dark natural brunettes. Ebony-tressed blondes look just as peculiar.
If you choose a wig to match your own hair, there’s no need to blabber about it at the office. It isn’t a shameful secret or anything like that, but once girls know you’re wearing a wig, they’re so impressed with its naturalness and beauty they’re always feeling the merchandise and wanting to try it on.
Dying doesn’t usually hurt strong hair. Miss Bruce Clerke of the Ladies’ Home Journal, dyed her hair twenty-seven different shades twenty-seven days in a row trying all the products that came into her office, and she still has a full head of hair. I mix the dye and peroxide in a plastic mixing bowl and swab it on with a long pencil which has cotton stuck on one end with colorless nail polish.
If you can’t brush after every meal, use dental floss! Once you finally acquire the habit of either brushing or using dental floss after you’ve eaten something, you’ll wonder how you ever stood yourself any other way. The dental floss can be used at your desk surreptitiously.
If you brush, leave a box of baking soda in the girls’ room. It’s the only dentifrice I know that won’t get stolen. One brave girl I know brushes with the yellow soap out of the wash-basin container. She says it’s the best dentifrice she ever used (she says this while foaming at the mouth of course).
The only way I know to have and keep a beautiful figure for the office is through exercise. So go home and exercise! For inspiration I’d suggest you read Bonnie Prudden’s How to Keep Slender and Fit after Thirty (Bernard Geis Associates) and Easy Way to a Perfect Figure and Glowing Health by Debbie Drake (Prentice-Hall). The program I’ve had the most luck staying with is the Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Plan for Physical Fitness (Pocket Books). It only takes twelve minutes a day and I’ve found you can last month after month.
Some girls keep a chinning bar across the door of their offices. Men love to use it when they swing through the door, and it’s good for you too. You can get one with green stamps (two books).
It’s fine to keep a little beauty kit in your desk drawer, but the best-groomed girls I know carry their supply kit right in their purse. A 6 ½ × 3 ½ when I was a little tyke of eighteen inch zipper bag holds lipstick, brush, pressed powder, mascara, eyebrow pencil, eye liner and brush, perfume flacon, safety pins, bobby pins, nail file and comb.
Should you go to the girls’ room for all touch ups? The company would lose a hundred million woman-hours a day if all girls did that. You can do quick checkups at your desk. If a man sees you, don’t panic. He knows you don’t glow entirely from inner fires. Naturally you only do checkups, not major overhauls, at your desk.
When you arrive at work in the morning, it’s nice to be fully put together. In an emergency, however (you’ve washed your hair at six A.M. and need the extra thirty minutes of bus-time to help you get dried) you can arrive in curlers if they’re under a big chiffon scarf so the effect is like that of a 1919 lady in a duster. The way you get away with this occasional casualness is by being an efficient, hardworking, dedicated girl worker who usually looks chic. That makes up for everything.
Now that we have you looking like a strawberry-vanilla bonbon, let’s see about an office to match.
Some girls don’t believe in sprucing an office or their cubicle or corner of an office. They feel it reveals the nesting instinct. What’s wrong with the nesting instinct? You’re a girl! And you spend more daylight hours in your office than any place else, so of course you want it to be homey. You’ll be entertaining men there, too. I don’t have in mind bringing in hand-crocheted antimacassars or jars of jelly to catch the light on the window ledge or anything like that. . . just a few colorful touches that say “you” and give the place a little warmth and welcome. If you don’t have an office of your own, you will (if you’ve started to follow the instructions in this book).
Certain companies are not for sprucing either, of course . . . they prefer virginal stainless steel and unadulterated fluorescent. Piffle much more chic than those scraggly, sexless philodendrons that seem to be the official office plant. Philodendron is okay, but it must be loved.
6. Draw a window in a windowless office. If an artist does this, he can draw it right on the wall, complete with Paris street scene. My friend Marilyn and I drew one for our friend Mary Louise on regular brown mailroom wrapping paper. It was stapled together in three sections—office wrapping paper comes just so big. We painted on curtains, panes of glass, flower pots on the sill, trees, birds and butterflies outside.
7. Campaign for a bulletin board—a big one. This is one thing your company might put up because it sounds so businesslike. Aside from office memoranda, etc., you’ll also tack up cartoons, interesting mailing pieces, travel posters and pictures of Albert Finney. One girl I know did a collage across her entire board with color pages from fashion books. She started with pink ones on the left side, branched into reds, purples, blues, greens and yellows. It was gorgeous!
8. Have something visible that’s related to client functions—marketing textbooks, charts, surveys, a map of distribution. Even if you aren’t on intimate terms with this material, just having it there is impressive. One public relations girl I know has her client’s U.S. distribution map tacked up, an Algerian dagger quivering right in the heart of Florida, his biggest market.
9. Books look marvelous and say good things about you. (Anybody who owns books can’t be all dumbbell.) Five dollars should buy ten to fifteen books in a second-hand store. (It’s better if they are books you’ve really read and liked.) Paperbacks look nice too. If you have magazines about, keep current. Throw out the 1953 Newsweeks.
10. Desk accessories should be female . . . sharpened pencils in a blue Delft jar, a Can Can dancer’s bronze boot for a paperweight, a cigarette box that is glass and gilt. Any small trophies you’ve won at tennis, badminton or the bossa nova could be used for paperweights too. Japanese stores are loaded with lovely baubles for offices—red lacquer trays on which you can keep two pretty teacups and a pot, a scroll for your wall, silk tassels to attach to any cord that turns on a light.
If your company supplies desk blotters, persuade whoever orders them to buy egg yellow, valentine red or blue next time instead of office-y green and brown.
11. Have fresh flowers on your desk. Anything sticking out over a back fence into the alley is for borrowing. Lemon leaves and eucalyptus branches at a dollar a bunch stay fresh for ages if you clip the stems. Girls who display flowers sometimes get brought them.
12. Keep an apothecary jar of hard candies on your desk. Gum-drops and jelly beans are delicious but disappear awfully fast. Some girls solve the expense problem by just letting the jar remain empty until the biggest eater takes the hint and refills it.
13. It’s okay to let your office achieve a well-cluttered look of “art objects.” An austere, businessy office wearing a girl inside suggests she’s pretending not to be one or else has no imagination. Well-cluttered with papers and junk is something else again. You can work better once they’re gone—so every now and then tidy the place like Mr. Clean.
If you’re a smoker, empty your ashtray. A girl I know saw her boss standing by her desk one day looking as though he’d been hit by a poisoned dart. Her eyes followed his eyes and saw four half-finished cups of coffee, all imprinted with a bright red lipstick smear, with cigarette butts floating in each. No fair throwing the coffee in the plants (murderess!) or in the waste basket. The janitors’ union will be up to see you.
The ashtray on my desk says “I’m sexy” in six languages all around its rim. I’m sure you can find one just as interesting.
All right, there you are—your face, your figure and your office all gussied up to absolute perfection so that lovely things can happen to you. Let’s go on now to what you can make of your job—by working very hard and looking very delectable.