Taken from the winter 2022 issue of Dazed. You’ll be able to buy a duplicate of our latest issue here

Doreen Bloch was reading through transcripts of telephone conversations between Jackie Kennedy, then first lady, and dermatologist Dr Erno Laszlo when she became confused. The conversation was almost unintelligible, with each Kennedy and Dr Laszlo using cryptic language, trailing off mid-sentence and making oblique references to unspecified “circumstances”.

Unsure of what she had stumbled upon, Bloch consulted with presidential scholar Professor Barbara Perry from the University of Virginia and, after cross-checking dates and timelines, the rationale for her secrecy and coded language dawned on them: the primary lady was pregnant, but couldn’t say it outright in case the phone was tapped. Armed with this context, the underlying conversation revealed itself – pregnancy hormones were making Kennedy’s skin break out; it was changing on daily basis, she told her dermatologist. He advised against applying excessive oils and creams to maintain blackheads at bay and prescribed his Lively Phelityl Oil for the president, who was getting breakouts himself on his back from taking his day by day 4 baths.

In August 1963, a number of months after the conversations with Dr Laszlo, Kennedy delivered Patrick Kennedy preterm, and he lived just two days before passing away. In November, JFK was assassinated. For Bloch, this context gave extra layers to the transcripts, making the reading bittersweet. “It’s very intimate, it almost feels uncomfortably intimate… She’s pregnant but we all know what comes later,” says Bloch. “People at all times think beauty is just this fun thing but there’s politics, there’s culture, business. I mean, there are empires related to it.”

Bloch is the co-founder of the Makeup Museum. Opened in 2020, it’s the primary of its kind – a web based and sometimes physical space dedicated solely to make-up and the cosmetics memorabilia that goes alongside it. The museum’s collection dates back hundreds of years and spans the globe. Within the inventory you’ll find items like a 5,000-year-old kohl cosmetics jar from ancient Egypt, a Qingbai ware cosmetics box from the Northern Song dynasty dated AD960-1127, and actress Mae West’s blue enamel compact. Probably the most recent acquisition is a carved wood cosmetics box from the Kuba Kingdom (now modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo) which once contained red tukula powder comprised of tree bark that will be applied to the face, body and hair. The box is one among the items which may be displayed in a future exhibition on cosmetics in Africa, which is on Bloch’s shortlist for upcoming projects. Through its collection and exhibitions, the museum documents and explores not only the history of the industry however the impact that beauty has on culture, society and politics.

Beauty trends across make-up, hair, fragrance, skincare and even body modifications like tattoos and piercings have at all times been an indicator of the times – a solution to trace and chart what’s happening in contemporary culture. You’ll be able to map changing attitudes towards make-up on to the arrival of electricity after which the rise of social media, each occasions which brought latest attention to non-public appearance. Growing sales within the Forties mark the working women of wartime America having their very own disposable income for the primary time. Popular hairstyles from various many years have come to be symbols reflecting the sociopolitical mood of their times – bobs within the 20s (women liberated from societal constraints), Afros within the 60s (civil rights activists rejecting white culture), skinheads within the 80s (disenfranchised and disillusioned youth). Eurocentric beauty ideals and prejudice towards darker skin tones reveal themselves through the £9bn global marketplace for skin-lightening creams.

It was intersections between culture and cosmetics like these that were explored within the museum’s debut exhibition, Pink Jungle: Nineteen Fifties Make-up in America – a round-trip tour of the last decade that birthed the fashionable cosmetics industry. Paying tribute to the age of glamour and Hollywood fantasy, the exhibition featured artefacts like Marilyn Monroe’s personal skincare routine from 1959, revealed for the primary time and on loan from Erno Laszlo’s archives, and a bird-shaped compact designed by Salvador Dalí. At the identical time, it offered a stark have a look at the racism and homophobia rife throughout the era, and the legacy of beauty standards which, as Bloch says, were overwhelmingly white, heteronormative and Eurocentric.

“As we began peeling back the layers, it became increasingly interesting,” says Bloch about putting together the debut exhibition. “We could have never imagined the political layers and connections that unfolded for us… It’s fascinating to think how pervasive beauty is, even in ways in which we don’t typically take into consideration.”

Originally slated for a May 2020 opening, the pandemic forced Pink Jungle to debut online before eventually opening in Latest York that September. Positioned within the Meatpacking District, the space was as glamorous as you’ll desire a make-up museum to be, with vintage magazine ads covering the partitions and a red door paying homage to Elizabeth Arden. While the immersive, tactile elements originally planned were forced to be scrapped due to social distancing, an interactive app helped visitors engage with the gathering.

The birth of the Makeup Museum got here someday in 2018 when Bloch was sitting in a parking lot for her son’s paediatrician appointment and “a light-weight bulb went off”. She called beauty editor Caitlin Collins, who confirmed it was an excellent idea, and the pair, along with make-up artist Rachel Goodwin, began putting plans into motion. Bloch was driven by her curiosity about how the sweetness trends we see now connect us to the past, and believed there was a niche for exploring these historical throughlines and surfacing the artefacts themselves. Grooming and beautifying is one among the oldest human rituals but people today have a bias towards the current, Bloch says – “I’ve heard it called presentism even though it really must be called past-ism” – and it’s creating blindspots. “There’s a lot that folks consider they own relating to a trend, not realising that, for hundreds of years in lots of cases, people have engaged in that very same way [with them].”

The Makeup Museum, and last 12 months’s Beauty Stories, the museum’s first book, aim to fill these gaps in common knowledge, expanding the canon of historical make-up traditions and educating people in order that beauty timelines don’t jump from Cleopatra’s eyeliner to Queen Elizabeth I’s painted face after which 400 years of white European trends. From teeth blackening in Vietnam to ceremonial facial paint from the Barasana people in Colombia, in Beauty Stories local writers tell the stories of their cultural beauty rituals.

More moderen make-up history is available in the shape of one among the museum’s key collections: an enormous, previously unseen archive of the journals of Kevyn Aucoin. Widely considered the world’s first celebrity make-up artist, Aucoin had an unparalleled influence on the sweetness industry, liable for Christy Turlington’s arched brow and Cindy Crawford’s lipliner. An avid documenter, Aucoin recorded his day by day life on camera and in scrapbook-style journals. The gathering preserved by the Makeup Museum takes us from 1983, when he first moved to Latest York from Louisiana together with his boyfriend Jed Root, to 1994, by which era he had established himself as fashion’s go-to make-up artist, usually collaborating with Steven Meisel and Irving Penn, Linda Evangelista and Liza Minnelli.

The archive comprises greater than 1,600 images and documents, from Aucoin’s Hollywood Rolodex to meetings with the most important names in fashion, and candid Polaroids and outtakes taken from the sets of iconic photoshoots. Until Bloch and Goodwin reached out to Aucoin’s family, via make-up artist and Aucoin protege Troy Surratt, this essential piece of fashion history was sitting in boxes in Louisiana. Still under lockdown in Latest York, they hired an area photographer to drive to the Aucoin family home and digitise the journals.

When the pictures began coming through, Bloch says it was breathtaking: “A photograph from Cindy Crawford’s birthday, all these original Polaroid outtakes from the highest photographers in fashion… it was a really exciting discovery. It seems like something that can evolve over the approaching years, [then] we’ll higher understand the themes and takeaways, but we felt like we actually got here across a treasure.”

Aucoin’s legacy continues to this present day, his touch present within the work of today’s beauty stars like Isamaya Ffrench, Mario Dedivanovic and Frederic Aspiras, who all cite him as inspiration for his or her careers and are actually shifting attitudes towards beauty in their very own right. Dedivanovic especially, says Bloch, is liable for the make-up that encapsulates the last decade – the contoured, sculpted and baked Instagram face made famous by Kim Kardashian. But while the Dedivanovic legacy will at all times be intimately connected with Kardashian, Aucoin stands alone. “He was just so prolific,” says Bloch. “It is basically hard to think about anyone else at that level who was liable for so many alternative trends and who worked with so many alternative people.”

Seeking to the longer term, Bloch is brimming with ideas for upcoming exhibitions and her continued exploration and study of make-up history, through which she sees limitless possibilities and dichotomies. She cites philosopher René Girard’s mimetic theory – that our desires and actions are only subconscious imitations of other people’s desires, which results in rivalry and conflict – as a lens through which to view cosmetics and the long history humans have of decorating our faces.

“Cosmetics create a differentiation, a uniqueness and skill to precise the person self and soul in some of the accessible ways in which the Earth gave us,” Bloch explains. “It’s so central to how humans evolved. Once we have a look at our reflections within the water, we would like to have the opportunity to see ourselves, not only in our facial expression, but in how we adorn ourselves.”

Day-after-day all of us make selections about our appearance, about how we present ourselves to the world. Baked into those selections are layers and layers of meanings, signifiers of politics, gender, class, sexuality. Unpacking those, exploring the wealthy archive of beauty history and preserving the ever-shifting attitudes towards make-up, will keep the Makeup Museum in business for a lot of, a few years to return.