The War and the Face: What Changed Before the Decade Began

The standard account of 1920s makeup begins in the 1920s. A decade arrives, hemlines rise, women paint their faces in public, and the modern cosmetics industry follows. It is a tidy sequence and it has the order wrong. The conditions that made a visible cosmetic thinkable were in place before the decade opened, and most of them have nothing to do with cosmetics at all.

Paint worn in public is not primarily a product problem. Rouge and lip colour existed, in quantity and in shops, throughout the nineteenth century. What did not exist was a large population of women whose ordinary day involved being looked at by strangers, in daylight, without a chaperone, in a context where their appearance was their own business.^[1]

A cosmetic worn in private is a preparation. A cosmetic worn in public is a statement, and it only becomes worth making when there is a public to make it to. The nineteenth-century objection to visible paint was rarely about chemistry; it was about what a painted face was understood to claim, and about which women were understood to be claiming it.^[2]

That objection loses its grip when the situations multiply. A woman who works a shift, travels to it, eats a midday meal away from home and returns after dark is visible to strangers for most of her waking day. The question of what her face is doing stops being a household matter. This is the shift that matters, and it is a shift in circumstance rather than in taste.^[2]

The First World War moved large numbers of women into waged work outside the home — munitions, transport, clerical work, agriculture — and the move was public in a way domestic service was not. A servant is employed inside someone else's house. A conductor is employed in the street.^[3]

It is easy to overstate what followed. A great deal of wartime employment ended with the war, and the women who had held it were frequently expected to leave it. But the habit of being out, paid and among strangers did not reverse as neatly as the employment figures did, and the clothing that went with it — shorter, plainer, more practical — is documented as continuing into the following decade rather than being invented in it.^[4]

Votes for women arrived in Britain in stages — a limited franchise in 1918, equal terms in 1928 — and in the United States with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The temptation is to draw a straight line from the vote to the lipstick, and it is worth resisting.^[5]

The franchise did not make anybody wear rouge. What it did was confirm, in law, a category that advertising and employment had already begun to address: the adult woman as an individual with her own business in the world. Cosmetics advertising of the period speaks to exactly that figure, and it is the address rather than the legislation that sells the product.^[5]

The suffrage connection is also, in one specific case, literal: American suffragists were photographed wearing lipstick on marches, using a cosmetic that respectable opinion disapproved of as a deliberate signal. That is a real and documented use of paint as argument. It is not the same as the vote causing a fashion.^[5]

The least discussed of these changes is the most domestic. Domestic service had been the largest single category of women's employment in Britain and a very large one in the United States, and it contracted sharply across this period. Women who would previously have entered service went into shops, offices and factories instead.^[6]

This matters to a history of cosmetics for an unglamorous reason. Service was live-in, supervised and structured around someone else's household routine. Shop and office work was none of those things. It paid in cash, ended at a fixed hour, and left both the evening and the wage under the worker's own control — which is the condition under which a small, repeatable, optional purchase becomes possible.^[6]

None of this means the 1920s contributed nothing. It contributed the objects. The sealed metal lipstick case, the powder compact with a mirror in the lid, the pressed rouge that travelled without spilling — these are genuine products of the period, and they are what turned a possible habit into a practised one.^[7]

It also contributed the sales apparatus: the counter, the demonstration, the colour system, the film tie-in. Those are decade-specific and they are covered elsewhere on this timeline. The point of this piece is only that they landed in a world already prepared to receive them, and that a history which starts at 1920 describes the flowering and misses the root.^[8]

How many women actually wore visible cosmetics in 1919, as against 1925, is not recoverable with any precision. There is no survey, and sales figures for the period are partial, commercially motivated and rarely separated by product. Statements about proportions of women wearing lipstick in a given year should be treated as estimates unless the source names its method.^[9]

What can be said is narrower and better attested: the industry's own scale grew very substantially across these years, and the growth was in exactly the categories that suit a face worn out of doors.^[10]