In my loft there is a red plastic B&Q toolbox filled with makeup no longer fit for purpose, but that I’ll never, ever throw away. There’s a dried-out Body Shop eyeliner pen that my mother put in my Christmas stocking circa 1989, which I wore with cut-off Levi’s and a lycra bodysuit to Cardiff’s Square club. There’s a pot of Clinique face powder in an unsuitable shade of pink that I saved at least six weeks’ pocket money to buy before realising it made me look embalmed. There’s the Rimmel lilac eye palette I was convinced made me appear 18; the apricot lip balm bought for me by fourth form squeeze Hywel White; and the Mary Quant eyeshadows I found in a dusty box in a discount chemist and thought I’d won the lottery.
These aren’t just products. This isn’t just a toolbox. It’s a time capsule, and everything in it takes me back to a moment – a hope, a mistake, an achievement. These unassuming bits and pieces each have their own significance and collectively add up to something as potent as any long-lost cassette compilation. They’re my beauty mixtape.
Just as we chart life’s journey through music, food and places, I also attribute the same importance and sentimentality to the beauty products I saw, touched and smelled all around me. The flipping of a lid on a bottle of Johnson’s baby lotion immediately takes me back to my grandmother’s living room, my clean pyjamas warming on the fireguard, the soothing hum of Antiques Roadshow and the rattle of a twin tub washer in the background. I don’t just remember my first kiss: I remember the Miss Selfridge Copperknockers lipstick smeared messily over my cheeks afterwards. My first ever gig was notable not only because it was The Smiths on their last tour, but because I’d stolen my mum’s Rimmel lipliner and Givenchy Ysatis perfume for the evening.
A memorable beauty product transports me to my nan’s backstreet curl-and-set parlour, my teenage cabin bed, a school disco or my wedding day. It’s the perfumes that gave us backbone for important job interviews that stay with us, the makeup chosen for a first date, the little luxury bought with a first pay packet. These are some of the lotions, potions, creams and powders that mean the most to me.
Chanel No 5
In perfume-nerd circles, saying that Chanel No 5 is your favourite perfume is as obvious as declaring Shakespeare and the Mona Lisa your favourite playwright and painting. But sometimes things simply are the best; there’s no use being contrary.
Even if you don’t like No 5 (and many people don’t: smell is a wholly subjective business), you should still respect this remarkable 94-year-old perfume – arguably the most recognisable beauty product of all time. It was created by the extraordinarily clever and talented Russian-French perfumer Ernest Beaux, who made up 10 versions, numbering them one to five and 20-24. Superstitious Coco Chanel chose five, her lucky number. She packaged it in a typically unfussy flacon, inspired by men’s toiletries and adorned with nothing more than a square label and simple type – a pretty subversive move in itself, at a time when luxury perfumes came in big, blowsy balloon-atomisers.
The scent itself – powdery, fizzy, sexy and refined – is magnificent, whether or not it’s your particular bag (impressively, it remains the world’s bestselling scent).
For me, though, it goes way beyond smell. Outside my immediate family, the most enduring relationship of my life has been with No 5. I discovered it at 12, and wore it with vintage Levi’s and Smiths T-shirts at school discos; I spritzed it over my uniform when I ran away from home three years later. It moved to London with me when I had nothing but a PE bag’s-worth of belongings; it lost my virginity with me, it came on my driving test. Naturally, it was a guest at my wedding. Some years later, broken, confused and tearful, I considered no other fragrance for my father’s funeral.
Nowadays, I wear No 5 perhaps once or twice a month (I love perfume too much to be monogamous); but when I have a big work day or a special occasion, I unfailingly turn to its strength, unflappable appropriateness and soft, welcoming femininity. No 5 is my backbone in a bottle, the loaded pistol in my knickers; with it, I am instantly bolstered and prepared for whatever life throws at me.
Ponytail holders
Does the word “bobble� mean anything to anyone under 35? I worry that it doesn’t. For the rest of us, bobbles were hair elastics twisted into a figure 8 and clamped in the middle with metal.
At each end was a brightly coloured plastic cube or ball, fed through the tightly-wound elastic loops to secure plaits, ponytails and bunches in place. Bobbles were sold by the pair in chemists and newsagents, on little perforated cards that were torn off a large display – just like Big D pub snacks, only without the underlying Page 3 boobs.
My father, recently left by his wife, was tasked with doing my hair for school. He was so woefully inept that I spent each morning standing on a chair, listening to him swear as bobbles pinged, snapped and ricocheted, one after the other, out of his hands and against the kitchen wall.
Marc Jacobs has often tried to revive the bobble – at both his own Marc label and while at Louis Vuitton – and each time, I’ve been bemused at the willingness of fashion fans to pay more than £100 for something my father was ultimately forced to buy weekly from a local cash and carry.
Mac Spice lip pencil
When someone sits down to write the history of the nineties, they should do it in Mac Spice lip pencil. This reddy-brown liner became the Canadian-born brand’s first hero product and was the makeup accessory of the supermodel era; it graced a hundred glossy magazine covers, and Linda Evangelista was never without it (I’m told she always conveniently needed to pee before shooting, then snuck on some Spice in the ladies’ loo if the makeup artist had failed to). It became the look for a generation of girls like me, who thought it the height of sophistication to wear a lip pencil five shades darker than the lips it outlined.
After making a pilgrimage to buy my first Spice in Harvey Nichols (Mac’s only UK stockist at the time), and having nicked my mum’s peach Covergirl lipstick, I debuted the look at a Salt-N-Pepa concert in Newport leisure centre. The band failed to show up, but I didn’t care because I felt a million dollars.
Spice subsequently accompanied me to acid house clubs, to gigs and on dates with inappropriate men. It accessorised Kookaï hotpants, Lycra frocks from Pineapple, smiley T-shirts and red Kickers. I teamed it with fishnets, a velvet choker and a beret, and imagined myself in an Ellen von Unwerth photoshoot. I wore it with jeans and a wide headband and felt like Bardot; with a football shirt and Adidas Gazelles, and thought I was Christy Turlington on the John Galliano catwalk.
I was far from any of these things, but now look back on Spice without a moment’s regret: it’s still an often-used part of my kit – though now I wear it with a matching lipstick and not a gloss the colour of Elastoplast.
Max Factor Crème Puff
This powder is one of the first makeup items I was ever really aware of. As a tiny girl, I would sit next to my grandmother on the bus and, as we neared our destination, watch her reach into her handbag for a gilt Stratton compact housing a pan of Crème Puff. She’d sweep the sponge over her nose and chin briskly before clicking it shut, but just long enough for the strong, sweet baby powdery-smelling particles to scent the whole top deck.
That smell, unchanged in six decades, still does strange things to me. It smells of my nan, yes, but mostly Crème Puff just smells unapologetically of makeup (much as Dior lipstick does, or Bourjois powder rouge), at a time when makeup often smells of nothing at all.
It doesn’t pretend to be state-of-the-art; it’s an old-fashioned formula that made Hollywood actresses Ava Gardner, Vivien Leigh and Jean Harlow appear luminous on set. It continues to do the job extremely well today (though, sadly, its nostalgia is misplaced in a Caucasian-only shade range). It’s perfect with retro red lips, black flicks and falsies; its full, layerable coverage also makes it a great way to skip foundation on a more natural face – just brush over moisturiser and concealer. It’s a product I use rarely, but I would never pack a full kit without it. Sometimes, it’s the only thing that will do.
Johnson’s baby shampoo
My love of this product is merely notional, since I don’t recall ever having it in the house as a child, despite two babies arriving after me. The first shampoo to use amphoteric cleansing agents, so gentle that they didn’t sting the eyes, it seemed like something that would belong to the kind of family who had a purpose-decorated nursery, a wallpaper border to match the moses basket, a savings account opened and a school place lined up for a newborn. It wasn’t for big chaotic families like ours, prone to bathing babies in the kitchen sink, complete with Fairy Liquid bubble beard and within reach of the bread knife.
It was decades later that I used No More Tears to wash my makeup brushes, and bought some in readiness for my first baby, when just owning the right supplies made me feel in control. Using it, I momentarily felt like a proper mum, despite the fact I was entirely at sea. I think this is why Johnson’s has been deeply loved since 1936: when the disorienting, confusing, guilt-ridden, anxious (and ultimately wonderful) experience of motherhood strikes, it stands nobly by the side of the bath, as reassuringly experienced as a nanny, making you feel that everything will be OK.
Sisley Black Rose Cream Mask
Oh, Sisley, with your aloof, impenetrable French packaging, unknowable department store counters and your bonkers price tag that makes you inaccessible to the vast majority of beauty lovers: I wish you weren’t so damned lovely. This is the mask used by supermodels after six weeks of sleepless and over-made-up skin. It’s the mask reserved by makeup artists for only the best magazine covers and their gold-band clientele. It’s the mask I give to women at their lowest ebb, when divorce, bereavement or illness has ravaged the body, mind and soul. Rich, luxurious, gentle and soothing, a 10-minute session with Black Rose Cream Mask is like your most well-off girlfriend taking you for a four-hour lunch and three bottles from the lower half of the wine list.
Old Spice Original
Launched in 1938, this is the smell from the backseat of my grandad’s brown Austin Allegro as he drove me to Little Chef for the giddy treat of jumbo cod, chips, banana split and a free lollipop for clearing my plate. Its warm, not-too-strong but lasting spiciness is the smell of daytrips to Tenby, of candy-stripe brushed flannel sheets from the market, of a tiny metalwork room made from a cubby-hole under the stairs. It’s the smell of the armchair where we took Sunday naps during the rugby, had cuddles and belly laughs in front of Victoria Wood’s As Seen On TV, where my grandad sat patiently as I stood on a stool behind him, tying bows, plaits, jewels and clips into his white hair.
Old Spice is the scent of him trying to teach me long division when everyone else had lost patience, of very gentle flirting with the checkout ladies at Kwik Save, of seemingly endless chats with every Indian and Pakistani immigrant in Blackwood to practise his beloved Urdu and Burmese, learned during his time in Burma during the second world war. It’s the smell that filled a silent room whenever I asked what had happened to his friends there. Old Spice is the smell of his old shirt worn over my ra-ra dress to wash the car, of well-thumbed Robert Ludlum novels, of huge cotton handkerchiefs, of an often empty wallet, of the green zip-up anorak bought via 20 weekly payments from the Peter Craig catalogue. Old Spice was there when I first saw Madonna on Top Of The Pops, when the miners went back to work, and when we sat under blankets at military tattoos, both of us weeping like newborns. Its absence was felt acutely when I last saw his face, eyes closed in the room of a hospice; when I got married and when my babies were born.
Unlike so many other scents of my youth, Old Spice Original remains a gorgeous fragrance in its own right. I revere it not least because, as its early ad campaign asserted, “You probably wouldn’t be here if your grandfather hadn’t worn Old Spice.�
Sali Hughes’ guide to four era-defining looks, decade by decade
How they wore it in the 1930s
The 1930s was a big decade for innovation. Elizabeth Arden invented her legendary Eight-Hour Cream (a thick, medicinal-smelling moisturiser for the complexions of humans and the hooves of racehorses); Charles Revson of Revlon introduced the first opaque coloured nail lacquer and, consequently, the concept of matching lips and nails (the latter had previously been painted with transparent gloss); it was also the decade Max Factor, the man who invented the word “makeup�, released Pan-Cake, the first matte, skin-coloured foundation, developed to flatter movie stars in previously challenging Technicolor. Ninety years on, it remains the world’s fastest- and largest-selling single makeup to date.
The 30s face was deliberately top-heavy: brows were shaved off and replaced with ultra-thin domes of brown pencil to make eyes appear huge, almost owl-like. Cheeks were flushed with creme rouge worn so high as to practically skim the undereye, while lips were made smaller in a rosebud shape. The overall effect – gloriously showcased by stars such as Josephine Baker, Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy and Marlene Dietrich – was extremely soft, romantic and feminine, despite the increasing emancipation of women and the trend for more androgynous haircuts and bone structures. It was a look that proved enormously influential in the 1970s, particularly to designers such as Celia Birtwell and Biba’s Barbara Hulanicki.
How they wore it in the 1940s
The makeup of the 40s is what most of us regard as a classic Old Hollywood look: matte, flawless complexion, sharply sculpted face contours, elegant black liner flicks, wide, pillarbox-red lips and soft-set hair. Its clean, bold, graphic simplicity worked beautifully on film, but also, for ordinary people: makeup was rationed throughout the decade, so the fewer products that were needed, the better (no makeup at all would be unthinkable: even the government urged women to “put their best face forward� in order to boost soldier morale and remain jolly themselves).
Pencils were most easily acquired, so brows figured hugely. In the early 40s, they were soft, paler in tone and rounded to run parallel with arched socket line shadow. Later on, in part thanks to film noir, they arched sharply, in parallel with feline flicked liquid liner on the lids (painted that way to make actresses look sleepily seductive).
Despite the fact that 40s makeup is so easy to date through films and stars such as Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman, Olivia de Havilland and my idol, Elizabeth Taylor, it remains, I think, the least faddish and most timeless beauty look.
Forties features look like themselves: a little exaggerated, but mostly enhanced in moderation. It’s a womanly, rather than girlish, aesthetic. The limited colour palette of red, gold, beige, black, white and rose makes everything look more tasteful, more refined. I cannot think of a lovelier way to make up.
How they wore it in the 1950s
The 50s look is perhaps now the most recognisable period look, partly owing to the influence of Mad Men (all coral lips and teased chignons), but also to 50s pastiche pieces such as Grease (bouncy ponytails and extra-long falsies).
The decade was certainly a pivotal one for the beauty and consumer industries generally. This was when salon culture really took off: women across all economic groups routinely visited a professional for a weekly set, and it wasn’t at all unusual never to wash one’s own hair (which was now generally worn shorter for ease of maintenance between appointments).
The rise of the working woman meant that makeup looks varied and became more colourful according to outfit (pastel green, blue or lilac shadows were popular), and increased office work (as opposed to manual and factory jobs) made manicures a viable prospect for normal women. The elegance of the 40s didn’t disappear, but certainly became glossier and sexier thanks to Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Dandridge and Jayne Mansfield.
Despite this, it was still frowned upon for a woman to buy her own perfume: she should wait to be gifted it by a man. American beauty entrepreneur Estée Lauder got around the problem by disguising her new scent, Youth Dew, as a bath oil and undercutting the elite French perfume houses by some distance. Fifties women bought with impunity, loved it and a beauty icon was born; you can still buy the original oil today.
How they wore it in the 1960s
Sixties makeup is so much a part of British pop culture that it’s unfairly become a cliche: Terry O’Neill’s iconic images of Twiggy, saucer eyes trimmed top and bottom with long, spindly falsies. But while it was certainly revolutionary and hugely influential, this mod-ish style was specifically known as the London Look and adopted almost exclusively by young people. In an era obsessed with experimentation and increased sexual freedom, makeup looks were inevitably a little broader and more diverse.
For me, the most interesting developments were in France, specifically on Paris’s Left Bank and as part of the Nouvelle Vague movement. The aesthetic here combined the sophistication and womanliness of the classic 60s look with the bold chic of London. It flattened or ruffled the meticulous coiffs of the former, appropriated the monochromatic eyes of the latter, discarded all gimmicks, and made 60s beauty an altogether sexier and more grownup affair. Brigitte Bardot’s bed head, thick black swooshes of liner and pale, almost invisible pout, and Anna Karina’s thick fringe and polished complexion remain as sophisticated and relevant now as they did then.
Of course, the 60s were a game of two halves, albeit unequal ones, and the late 60s aesthetic was altogether different. Most notable was the Laurel Canyon hippie look: practically no makeup other than brightly coloured facepaint and naive illustrations on festival-goers and hardcore flower children. 1970s disco could not come soon enough.
• This is an edited extract from Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look At The Beauty Products That Changed The World, by Sali Hughes, published next week by Harper Collins at £26. To order a copy for £21.32, call 0330 333 6846 or go to bookshop.theguardian.com.
Makeup: Morag Ross using Suqqu, assisted by Lauren Oakey. Styling: Kara Kyne. Hair: Adam Reed using GHD. Nail technician: Sophia Stylianou at Frank using Orly.
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