Camera Beauty: Makeup and the Art of Image Making in Studio Era Hollywood

Abstract

“Camera Beauty: Makeup and the Art of Image Making in Studio Era Hollywood” explores how screen makeup developed in the American motion picture industry, and how these developments subsequently shaped normative beauty standards and practices. Between the years 1927 and 1937, the art of screen makeup underwent critical transitions attendant to the maturation of the Hollywood studio system, its increasingly realistic modes of representation, and the growing omnipresence of its star culture. Additionally, during this decade, the mass cosmetics industry grew exponentially and symbiotically alongside these changes in Hollywood, despite the economic devastation of the Great Depression. New consumer products, beauty expertise, and selling methods often stemmed directly from the motion picture industry, while trade discourse doubled as everyday makeup advice. Beauty editorials, cosmetics advertisements, and star testimonials elicited the consumer’s desire to embody Hollywood’s beauty standards “naturally” – to efface the labors involved in the makeup process and to thus increase the “market value” of her image. To examine this history, I draw from a variety of materials, including motion picture fan magazines, trade journals, print advertisements, and memoirs. This study includes a brief discussion on the norms and conventions of silent screen makeup; however, its main analytical focus begins in the late-1920s and ends in the late-1930s. I argue that it was during these years that the relationship between beauty, makeup, and the cinema took root in American culture, alongside the growth of the Hollywood studio system, and the standardization of its technologies and creative practices.