Pretty Past: Beauty Treatments of the 30s and 40s!

Edited By: Shai K.

Font Size:

A+ A-

Beauty treatments have always been around. Even thousands of years ago, women (and men) used to smear many different materials on their faces to age more gracefully, to renew the skin and to smooth out wrinkles and blemishes. The industrial revolution, and the dawn of machines, saw to it that many a contraption was invented in the beginning of the 20th century to cash in on the growing market of beauty treatments, promising a plethora of amazing results.

Here are some of the most fascinating of these contraptions and inventions:

'Freezing freckles off' using carbon dioxide was quite the common treatment during the 30s. To protect their faces, the patients' eyes were covered with plugs, their nostrils filled in and breathed through a special tube until the treatment was done.

A customer enjoying a large batch of huge blow driers, 1920s.

Permanent waving of the hair in Germany, 1929.

Max Factor designed this device to help women with applying their makeup back in the 1930s.

This creepy mask dates back to the 40s and would heat the face and head in an attempt to make the skin look fresh by stimulating circulation.

The 40s saw their share of weight loss treatments, and one of them used massage chairs, which massaged the legs using metal rollers to achieve a more slimming look, or so was believed.

Another beauty treatment of the 40s at the Helena Rubinstein’s salon.

Sun screen having only been invented in the mid 40s, bathers used to wear garments such as this freckleproof cape, which came complete with sunglasses to protect themselves from the sun's rays.

The curled look was in high demand before WWII, and many women spent hours with their hair bundled up into heating machines which kept it fashionably curled.

A fruit mask from the 1930s

A 'Glamour Bonnet' from the 40s which was supposed to give the users a rosy complexion by lowering the atmospheric pressure around their heads and faces, mimicking alpine conditions.

For smooth, spot-free skin, people sometimes relied on this 1930s suction machine, with its tiny glass nozzles, a rubber hose and a vacuum pump.

These women from the twenties are ridding themselves of wrinkles and worry lines with the help of rubber beauty masks.

This is the ‘Hangover Heaven’ face pack, which had plastic cubes that could be filled with water and frozen. The mask was popular with party-going Hollywood stars in the 1940s.