Any make-up lover will lose their mind with joy and envy over the vintage make-up treasures on show in the ‘History In Your Handbag’ museum-element of the House of Eldridge Pop-Up Studio in Covent Garden.
Make-Up Expert (MUA, brand founder, author and broadcaster) Lisa Eldridge has an astonishing collection of vintage make-up and some of it can currently be seen in her House of Eldridge Studio pop-up.
Make-up is to me what madeleines were to Proust: the mere sight of a particular lipstick case or nail varnish bottle can bring back a stretch of time or a significant moment with a clarity that is almost painful in its intensity.
I took a few pictures of some of the make-up that most resonated with me, and what follows is a very personal ‘Je me souviens’ on just three of the many, many lines you will find exhibited.
Miss Selfridge Kiss and Make Up
In the picture above, my focus is on those three shimmering glitter powders with the white caps. I owned the pink one and the bronze, and I think I had a sharp, sharp yellow one too. It’s been driving me crazy for a month that I can’t remember the names of these individual colours – because The Kiss and Make Up Range was all about the pun.
Readers of a certain age might remember poring over the makeup counter at Miss Selfridge choosing lipsticks with names like Brick Jagger (a gorgeous earthy red), Iron Lady (a metallic pink – I hated this one, and thought it was for girls who aspired to look like Margaret Thatcher), Doris Karloff (blood red, naturally), and Copper Knockers (bronze).
My favourite ever Miss Selfridge lipstick was life changing for me. It was called Running Bare, and I thought that I saw it for the first time worn by Yasmin on the cover of Just Seventeen in March 1984 but, I just retrieved the relevant issue from my bookcase, and guess what? The make-up credit is simply: ‘Maybelline’.
WTF?!
Somehow, I and my intimates convinced ourselves that Miss Selfridge Running Bare would allow us to channel our inner Yasmin, and I think I went through at least three tubes of it, wearing each one down to a stub, and then to a hollow that had to be applied with a fingertip.
Running Bare changed my life because until then, the beauty ideal presented to me had been anything but a full, fleshy lip. I’d grown accustomed to hearing a sympathetic “It’s a shame your lips are so big” from friends, and harsher, blatantly racist remarks from enemies and from adults who should have known better.
Just Seventeen magazine and Yasmin convinced me that times were changing, and that the small-featured, slightly prim ‘English Rose’ stereotype that loved its Rimmel Heather Shimmer, and couldn’t carry off Running Bare, wasn’t going to be the beauty ideal of a more interesting future.
BIBA
There is a considerable amount of BIBA to ooh and aah about: more than I’ve ever seen in real life. I never owned any of these ‘sugar bright’ shades, but in my early teens I stumbled across a little black box with the representative symbol worthy of veneration that is the BIBA logo. It contained sludgy matt green eyeshadows, that I knew would not suit me, and still I yearned for it as Romeo yearned for Juliet. I got it too – I was a very spoiled child.
Again, my path to make-up was through magazines. I’d read an interview (probably in Woman or Woman’s Own) with Barbara Hulanicki and her husband, Fitz that had made the deepest impression imaginable on my developing mind. I was entranced by them, by the work they did together and most of all, by the way in which they integrated work and family.
I bet on the right horse when I took Barbara Hulanicki as an inspiration. Anything and everything that Barbara Hulanicki turned her hand to was of interest to ten-year-old me, and as it was then, so it is now. Click here to read something I wrote a few years ago and have a look in the Want More box at the end of this post for more current Hulanicki links.
Nina Ricci
If everyone has one great love in their cosmetic life, this particular incarnation of Nina Ricci Le Teint Ricci is mine.
I might have mentioned once or twice that packaging is as important as product to me, and that I am a big fan of things that fall under the heading #TooPrettyToUse. And so it will probably not surprise you that when I first set eyes on the organic shapes and perfect colour palette that housed Nina Ricci cosmetics and skincare in the early 90s, I lost my fucking mind.
Picture the YGB a chubby toddler, and me, her mum, in my early twenties, absolutely determined that she be front and centre in my life (as Witold Hulanicki was in Barbara’s) and consequently broke as anything because I wasn’t a design genius and part-time work meant part-time pay for me back then. But I could always scrabble together a few coins to spend on Elle, and sometimes on Vogue, and consequently, when Le Teint Ricci launched with double page ads and the info that it was stocked at Selfridge, I was straight on the No.7 bus, small child in tow, to check it out.
I fell for the visuals, and was hooked like a fish by the tactile qualities of every bottle, tube, palette and jar. I don’t remember spending much time deliberating about the product – it was all about the packaging. I only discovered recently who designed it, and that they won a prestigious award for their work – you should click here to read about that – I’d feel like a fraud imparting this knowledge when I only know it thanks to Anna-Marie Solowijc telling me on instagram 🙂
Le Teint Ricci was expensive, but I scrimped and I saved. I performed the Danilo Wink over and over again to delight the FF coatcheck punters, and watched my little tip saucer fill up with money. Friends and family understood that my lust for this line was not a mere passion, but a need, and I benefitted from their generosity. The lady at the counter gave me samples. I accumulated quite a little collection, and spent hours arranging the boxes in different configurations of colour and shape, marvelling that the gold ‘graphic equaliser’ detail wiggled its elegant way seamlessly across my collection.
Le Teint Ricci was such a huge part of my life that it even made its way into the fiction that Pizzle and I were writing at the time.
Pizzle’s hand-writing is as notoriously indecipherable as his crossword clues, but above is a snapshot of a page written in 1993 in which our heroine prepares herself for afternoon delight in a famous motel with a man that she’s only just met – and Nina Ricci moisturiser is essential to the action.
Now let's return to that monkey!
You might find it hard to believe, but this adorable, hairy little monkey is in fact a powder compact. (As are the masks and the telephone dial in the picture that opened this post). I had to double-take and read the informative caption more than once, to ensure that I wasn’t hallucinating.
This monkey is tiny. Absolutely, unarguably tiny, but the geniuses at Schuco, who created him in 1929, contrived to fit a mirror on one side of his tummy, a powder puff on the other, and you can take his head off to access a lipstick in his neck. The absolute elegance of putting the lipstick in his dear little neck, which must have been a bit more tricky than simply shoving it in up the way, if you know what I mean … Words fail me, but that’s probably a good thing given what a long read this post has been.
Margot loved the ‘History In Your Handbag’ collection as much as I did and said that Eldridge’s collection deserves a permanent home in the V&A, and I agree.
Having said that, if I were Eldridge no way would I surrender even one of my amazing pieces to the nation; not unless the V&A rewarded my generosity by allowing me to cavort around the building after hours, wearing all the tiaras at once and romping on the beds in the furniture gallery.
If you have a passion for make-up, you owe it to yourself to make your way to the Royal Arcade in Covent garden as soon as you possibly can and have your own Proustian reverie taking in these gorgeous things and a whole lot more. Remember it’s a pop-up, and it’s scheduled to close by the end of December, so get your skates on!
Find the House of Eldridge Pop-Up Studio at 7 North Piazza, Royal Opera House Arcade, Covent Garden, London, WC2E 8HD
Open Monday- Saturday : 11am – 7pm and Sunday : 11am – 6 pm
Want more?
You can:-
- Find Lisa Eldridge on Instagram here and explore her website here
- Find Barbara Hulanicki on Instagram here
- Find Schuco on Instagram here
- Click here to find the Centre Pompidou entry about the design and designers of Le Teint Ricci 1991-1997
- Find discontinued perfume and makeup at East End Cosmetics – they had some Le Teint Ricci for sale when Margot and I last visited!
To my great sorrow Le Teint Ricci in the pink, peach and yellow colour combination didn’t last very long at all, and although Nina Ricci perfume is still available, cosmetics and skincare are discontinued.
Same goes for Kiss and Make Up, BIBA, and Barbara Hulanicki Cosmetics: but it’s always worth looking online if you yearn to be reunited with a discontinued product.
Many people find it strange that ‘out-of-date’ makeup and skincare can command premium prices, but I don’t think it’s strange at all. Cosmetics are so very personal and intimate, and so tied to time and place, that they have a talismanic ability to reconnect us to our younger selves. And that can be a priceless experience.
Ethical Stuff
There are no affiliate links in this post.
I have no current or previous relationship with Lisa Eldridge. This post is not sponsored or paid for, and nor was it expected or the content directed by Lisa Eldridge.
I am a long-time customer of East End Cosmetics but have no professional relationship with them at the time of writing.
