The Natural Look, Sold and Refused

The look arrived as a product line. In 1970 Noxell launched Cover Girl Super Sheer cosmetics, in the historian James Bennett’s words “better suited to the prevailing ‘natural look’”, with a foundation in shades such as Sheer Bare and a Translucent Powder in Sheer Nude and Sheer Natural.^[1] Estée Lauder’s Fresh Air Make-up of the same year offered “a natural, glowing, skim-on blush”, and its Tender Cheek Tint was sold in a range called Little Nothings.^[2] Revlon had made the joke first: its Natural Wonder Un-Lipsticks were advertised in 1969 in shades that included Nothing and Nothing Frosted.^[3]

The eye was simplified to match. As fashion moved towards a more natural look in the 1970s, Bennett writes, many women gave up false lashes for lash-extending mascaras; Maybelline’s water-based Great Lash appeared in 1971, and its Look Natural comb-on mascara in 1974.^[4][5] Advertising supplied a face as well. By the 1970s, according to the Smithsonian’s finding aid for the Cover Girl archive, “a new social emphasis on looking and dressing ‘naturally’” had produced a campaign built on “the wholesome glamour of the ‘girl next door,’ a blue-eyed, blonde all-American image.”^[6]

A product sold as natural did not have to say what it was made of. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 asked a cosmetic’s label to name the product, its maker and the quantity inside, not its ingredients.^[7] The decade had already seen a recall: in 1972 the Food and Drug Administration recalled consumer products containing more than 0.75 per cent hexachlorophene, the antiseptic of the previous decade’s medicated makeup.^[8]

On 7 February 1973 the FDA published two proposals for ingredient labelling, one of them a petition from Professor Joseph A. Page, Anthony L. Young and the Consumer Federation of America; of 291 comments received, 273 endorsed the idea.^[9] The final rule, published on 17 October 1973, required ingredients to be listed in descending order of predominance, let fragrance and flavour be declared in a word and trade secrets be withheld after review, and made the trade association’s Cosmetic Ingredient Dictionary the standard for names.^[9] It was to apply to products labelled after 31 March 1975; after stays and court proceedings, the FDA says, it “became fully effective in early 1977.”^[9][10]

The natural look had a narrow idea of nature. Cover Girl, whose liquid makeup was the best-selling makeup line in the United States by 1968, had launched in shades its historian judges suitable only for lighter skins, and its advertising, the finding aid records, featured “especially Caucasian women” until the 1980s.^[12][13] In NPR’s account there was, in the 1960s and early 1970s, no national makeup brand that catered to women of colour, only regional and smaller ones; Flori Roberts dates its own line to 1965 and claims to have been the first.^[14][15]

In 1973 Eunice and John Johnson, the publishers of Ebony and Jet, started Fashion Fair Cosmetics. They hired a chemist to make foundations and lipsticks for darker skin, packaged them in pink — because, in the recollection of the Fair’s announcer Audrey Smaltz, Estée Lauder’s was blue — and asked for space at the prestige counters, beginning with Marshall Field’s in Chicago, A&S in Brooklyn and Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan.^[14] The line eventually reached more than 1,500 department stores, and showed other companies a market they had been ignoring.^[14]

Put together, the decade’s products describe the face its advertising sold: a sheer liquid base set with translucent powder, and brows filled with a pencil from the larger eye ranges of the day — Cover Girl’s eye line of 1971 ran to 47 products;^[16] a skim-on tint on the cheeks;^[17] colour on the lids from a cream crayon, such as Cover Girl’s PeeperSticks or Revlon’s Natural Wonder Shiny Eyeshadow Crayon of 1973;^[16][18] lashes lengthened with mascara rather than false ones;^[19] and a glossed mouth, from Cover Girl’s Super Gloss for Lips of 1972 or Bonne Bell’s flavoured Lip Smackers of 1973.^[16][20] Shimmer had its moment too: glitter and pearlescent effects in eye shadow reached a highpoint in the 1970s and 1980s, largely through new synthetic pearls.^[21]

The plate here is reconstructed from those products rather than from any one woman’s routine, and the steps beside it say what each one takes to do now.

Not everyone wanted to look as if they wore nothing. In Britain glam rock put colour back on the face, and on men’s: as David Bowie built his Ziggy Stardust character in 1972 his band grew their hair long and experimented with eye makeup, and for the sleeve of Aladdin Sane in 1973 the photographer Brian Duffy drew a lightning bolt across Bowie’s face for the makeup artist Pierre Laroche to fill with colour.^[22][23] Fans, the V&A records, came to concerts imitating it, with the sleeve as their model.^[23]

Punk went further. In Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, photographed in 1977, the model and actress Jordan, who worked at Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique on the King’s Road, appeared with her face painted in geometric lines above a twin set and pearls, a mixture of “traditional clichés” with “spiked hair and heavy make-up” that the V&A calls typical of punk.^[24] By 1980 a weaver was recording a girl punk she had first seen in a tea shop in Bath, with purple lightning strikes across her cheeks and black and burgundy lipstick.^[25] Both were faces made to be noticed, in a decade that sold makeup on the promise that it would not be.

The decade’s turns are better documented as products than as practice. The sources here record what was sold as natural, not how many women wore less makeup, or whether they did; Bennett’s suggestion that the hexachlorophene scare of 1972 “may have accelerated” a shift already under way is offered as a possibility, and is reported here as one.^[26]

Dates disagree where several events can claim the same change. Ingredient labelling is dated 1973 in one industry timeline, by its publication; the rule set 31 March 1975 for products as labelled; and the FDA dates full effect to early 1977.^[27][28][29] Claims to be first disagree too: NPR describes no national brand for women of colour before Fashion Fair, while Flori Roberts calls its 1965 range the first, a claim this archive reports as the company’s own.^[30][31]

Some popular stories are absent for want of a source. Revlon’s Charlie, launched as a fragrance in 1973 and extended into a cosmetics line in 1974, is often presented as the emblem of a new, independent woman; the sources used here document the products, not that reading of them.^[32] And the account of the Fashion Fair models blending their own foundation rests on one witness, recalling it decades later.^[30]