Beauty under rationing, and the duty to look well

Wartime is unusually good for historians of appearance, for a slightly grim reason: scarcity makes people write things down. Ordinary practice that nobody records in normal times becomes a subject of complaint, of advice columns, of government messaging and of letters, and the result is that we know more about what British women did to their faces between 1939 and 1945 than about any comparable period before it.

Not rationed, but not available

The first correction is that cosmetics were never rationed in Britain in the coupon sense. Clothing was, food was, petrol and fuel were. Cosmetics were not.

They were, however, subject to a set of controls that produced scarcity by other routes. Limitation of supplies orders restricted the quantity of non essential goods manufacturers could produce. Raw materials were directed to war production, and the materials used in cosmetics, including fats, oils, alcohol, glycerine and metals for packaging, were needed elsewhere. Glycerine in particular has an obvious wartime alternative use. Metal for lipstick cases became unavailable, and cardboard and plastic substitutes appeared. Purchase tax was applied at high rates to goods classed as luxuries.

The result was cosmetics that existed but were expensive, intermittent and often reformulated with whatever was available. Records of manufacturing controls and of the departments that administered them survive in the national archives, and the trade press of the period documents the industry's continual negotiation over allocations.

Appearance as morale

Alongside the scarcity ran a message, and it is one of the more interesting pieces of state adjacent persuasion of the period: that maintaining one's appearance was a contribution to morale rather than a frivolity.

The argument appeared in government adjacent publicity, in women's magazines, in advertising by manufacturers who had very little product to sell and considerable interest in keeping their names alive, and in the services. Women in the auxiliary services had regulations governing appearance, and looking smart in uniform was treated as a matter of discipline in the same way it was for men.

It is easy to be cynical about this and worth resisting the impulse. The argument was made by women as well as to them, and the accounts that survive from the period suggest that it was widely felt rather than merely imposed. A recognisable face in the mirror during a period of profound disruption is not a trivial thing, and the frequency with which lipstick specifically appears in first hand accounts of the period, including accounts from women in extremely difficult circumstances, suggests something more than compliance with a campaign.

Liquid stockings, and the gravy question

The best known improvisation of the period is leg makeup. Silk and then nylon stockings became effectively unobtainable, and the response was to colour the legs and, in the most frequently described refinement, draw a seam up the back of the calf with an eyebrow pencil.

Two things about this are worth separating. Commercial leg makeup was a real product, manufactured and advertised, and surviving examples and advertisements are held in museum collections including those of the Imperial War Museums. This is documented and unambiguous.

The claim that women commonly used gravy browning for the purpose is a different matter. It appears constantly in popular accounts and in oral history, and it is entirely plausible: the material was available, it is the right colour, and improvisation was universal. What is doubtful is the frequency. Gravy browning was itself a rationed food product, it smelled, and it attracted insects and stained clothing, all of which are drawbacks people mentioned. The likelihood is that it happened, that it was memorable, and that its memorability has caused it to be reported as standard practice when the commercial product was the normal solution for those who could get it.

Improvisation is remembered because it is interesting. What most people actually did was queue for the ordinary product and complain about the quality.

Hair, safety and the turban

The most consequential wartime change in appearance was not cosmetic at all. Large numbers of women entered industrial work, and long hair around unguarded machinery is extremely dangerous. Serious scalping injuries occurred, and the response was mandatory hair covering in many factories, which produced the wrapped turban and the snood as everyday wear.

This is a rare and clear case of a fashion originating in an industrial safety requirement and then outlasting it, and the turban in particular persisted into post war fashion as a style rather than a precaution. Imperial War Museums collections and the period's public information material document the safety campaigns directly.

After

Rationing in Britain continued after the war and was not fully wound up until 1954, and shortages in consumer goods persisted well beyond the end of hostilities. The cosmetics industry's post war expansion, when it came, arrived into a market that had spent fifteen years unable to buy what it wanted, which is a substantial part of why the 1950s look the way they do.

Elsewhere, and worse

Britain's experience was constrained. Conditions in occupied Europe and in the camps were of an entirely different order, and appearance there carried a weight that no discussion of morale can approach. Survivor testimony held in archives including those of the Imperial War Museums records the significance attached to small acts of grooming under conditions designed to remove individuality entirely, and the deliberate use of head shaving and the destruction of personal appearance as instruments of that removal, which is treated in the essay on hair politics.

This magazine records that rather than dwelling on it, because it is the strongest available evidence for a claim that would otherwise sound sentimental: that the maintenance of appearance is not a trivial concern layered on top of survival but is, for a great many people, part of how survival is conducted. The historical record on this point is unusually consistent and it comes from people who had every reason to have stopped caring.

What the shortage left in the archive

One unintended benefit of the period is documentary. Because cosmetics became a subject of complaint, of policy, of advice and of improvisation, they entered the written record in a way they never had before. Government files on supply allocation, trade press arguments about quotas, magazine advice columns on making things last, and a very large body of oral history collected afterwards together constitute the best documentation of everyday cosmetic practice in Britain for any period before the arrival of market research.

That is a general rule worth stating, because it applies across this magazine: practices become visible in the record when they become difficult. Nobody writes down what everybody does without thinking. The historian of appearance is therefore always working from periods of disruption, scarcity, controversy or prohibition, which introduces a systematic bias towards the exceptional that has to be corrected for constantly.

The period also left a durable idea behind: that appearance is connected to resilience rather than to vanity. That argument had been made before, but it was made with unprecedented force and unusual official sanction between 1939 and 1945, and it has never entirely gone away. It sits underneath a great deal of contemporary language about self care, and it is worth knowing where it came from, because it was, in origin, a production argument as much as a psychological one. For the older idea that cleanliness and appearance indicate character, see the essay on soap.

Where to look

Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The Imperial War Museums and the The National Archives both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.