For Lisa Eldridge, Vintage Makeup Is a Portal to the Past — and a Mirror for the Soul

Can the history of humanity be told through makeup ? Lisa Eldridge is working on it. Her 5,000-plus collection of beauty products, ranging from an ancient Egyptian kohl mixing palette to Chinese opera makeup brimming with lead, to the beauty packs from the first-class cabins on the Titanic, to the colored eye shadows from Miss Selfridge and CoverGirl from the 1980s and 1990s, is a study in anthropology, philosophy and sentiment. The collection, housed in a private museum she built inside her London studio, has been in the works since the 1990s, when she bought a box of old Biba makeup at Portobello Road Market for five pounds. Over the years, the makeup artist and entrepreneur has added blushes, eye creams and color palettes found at estate sales in the U.S.; paints and pigments from Shiseido and other brand archives, and Old Hollywood artifacts, such as Marlene Dietrich’s powder compact and Marilyn Monroe’s lipsticks, bought online, at auction or through her trusted network of dealers. A small sampling of Lisa Eldridge ’s vast collection of vintage cosmetics. Courtesy of Lisa Eldridge In some cases, the collection stretches beyond makeup into products, including a “pristine pair” of clippers used to bob ladies’ hair during the flapper era and a tube of cherry toothpaste made by a brand endorsed at the time by Queen Victoria. Having written the book “Face Paint: The Story of Makeup” (2015), created the BBC series “Makeup: A Glamorous History” (2021), and consulted on exhibitions at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, the Victoria & Albert and the Wellcome Collection in London, Eldridge also gets regular donations from people entrusting her with special paints, powders and formulations that once belonged to friends and family. Although she didn’t buy the Biba haul until she was working as a professional makeup artist in the 1990s, Eldridge said her love of color, texture and packaging goes back to when she was 6 years old, poking around an old box containing her mother’s teenage makeup from the late 1960s. For a kid who loved drawing, the box, with its many drawers, was a portal to a sparkling, colorful world. “When I saw the pencils, I thought they were the best ever because they were shiny and had shimmer — all the things my crayons and pencils didn’t have. Plus, there were these lovely, gloopy little Avon products with squeezy gloss that smelled really different and very strange to me — but interesting,” said Eldridge in an interview. “I used them for my drawings, smearing them onto paper and seeing them glitter. And I loved the objects. I think they were what attracted me the most, the shapes of the little boxes and the funny novelty stuff. As a child, I was very inspired by anything connected to makeup history. If we ever went to the museum or to exhibitions, I was always looking at all the little pots,” she added. Eldridge has strict parameters for what she will, and won’t, buy. She only collects makeup that was “iconic at the time it was made, groundbreaking, or classic brands and items that defined their moment. I never want anything that’s derivative.” A 1930s product wrapped in Victorian-style packaging makes her shiver. A small sampling of Lisa Eldridge’s vast collection of vintage cosmetics. Courtesy of Lisa Eldridge “I’m always fussy about pastiche,” she said. Her favorite period for collecting is the interwar one, between 1918 and 1939, when women began working, spending money, casting off beauty and fashion norms. They were watching movies, reading gossip magazines, newspapers, gazing at Hollywood faces, and hoping to replicate them. The times went from “having a pharmacist mix your makeup, or doing it yourself, to walking into Woolworth’s, and for a dime, buying a lipstick, putting it on, and all of a sudden becoming Theda Bara, Josephine Baker or Louise Brooks,” she said. Eldridge is interested in the packaging from that era, too, the lipstick cases from brands like Max Factor, Coty, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein “designed like skyscrapers” in metal or Bakelite, some of which were “architecturally stunning.” She’s used the mechanics and design of that early packaging as inspiration for her eponymous makeup line, and also has an in-house lab where she can identify and recreate vintage pigments. Her favorite piece is a set of false eyelashes from the 1930s, when they were first being commercialized. “They’re in a beautiful box, which is totally intact, and the lashes look like they’ve been worn about 100 times. The glue bottle’s still in there, but it’s completely empty. It was so beautifully kept, and I think the person who owned them didn’t have a lot of money because they obviously couldn’t buy another set, so they wanted to protect them.” Eldridge sounds wistful, speculating about the person who might have worn them. “They were stepping into this incredible world of glamour. I imagine them coming home from their job, putting on these lashes, and feeling so glamorous and confident. “It’s history in your hands, and in your handbag,” she added. “It’s something so personal and so tied into everything happening at that time. It’s human history, that reflects our need to paint, to be creative, to be expressive.”