20 Old Hollywood Beauty Secrets Stars Never Wanted You To See

It wasn’t just Marilyn Monroe’s red lipstick that looked flawless. Her makeup artist, Allan “Whitey” Snyder, gave her a darker lip liner around the edges, a lighter color in the middle, and a little bit of Vaseline on top to give it some dimension. He applied the same trick to her eyes with a dab of Vaseline on her lids, then finished the look with a drawn-on beauty mark.

Jean Harlow earned the nickname “Platinum Blonde” in Hell’s Angels (1930) and went on to star in the film Platinum Blonde (1931). Her hairdresser, Alfred Pagano, and colorist, Pearl Porterfield, bleached her hair every week in a dangerous concoction of peroxide, ammonia, Clorox bleach, and even Lux soap flakes, a laundry product. If that ingredient list sounds alarming now, it should. Harlow died in 1937, at age 26, due to kidney failure that stemmed from a childhood bout of scarlet fever. The bleach didn’t kill her, contrary to popular belief.

Audrey Hepburn’s “pixie cut” first appeared in Roman Holiday (1953) and was snipped in Rome by hairstylist Grazia De Rossi together with Paramount hair department chief Wally Westmore. Grazia’s husband, the makeup artist Alberto De Rossi, gave Hepburn her signature doe-eyed makeup; however, he did not pick up the scissors. It’s a credit many fans still get wrong. She also popularized thick, dark, penciled eyebrows in Sabrina (1954), contrary to the previous decades’ trend of plucking them down to nothing.

Mary Pickford didn’t use heat for her famous ringlets. For more than ten years during the 1910s and 1920s, the silent-film actress rolled her damp hair in leather rags overnight. Anyone who has ever complained about sleeping in rollers may suddenly feel a little less inconvenienced. She made headlines when she chopped off her ringlets for a bob in 1928.

Marlene Dietrich’s eyebrows vanished, starting with Morocco in 1930. The studio artists replaced her real ones with penciled-in high, thin arches, while dark gray shading powder below her cheekbones, aided by bright lights from above, gave Dietrich the look of deeply hollowed cheeks. It’s said that she had back molars pulled to make the effect more pronounced, but film historians consider that story apocryphal, or likely invented.

In Pandora’s Box (1929), Louise Brooks wore her hair in a severe, geometric bob cut with straight-across bangs, and she had it glossed with pomade. It was sharper and straighter than the soft, waved bobs that were more common earlier in the decade. The style helped turn the short haircut from a rebellious trend into a worldwide icon of the flapper generation.

Veronica Lake’s iconic “peekaboo” wave, with hair draped over her right eye, was introduced in I Wanted Wings (1941). In 1943, the War Production Board, a federal wartime agency, issued a public plea to Lake to have her hair pinned up following complaints that female factory workers were getting their long hair caught in machinery. The request was not mandated by law. Lake acquiesced and was photographed with her hair pinned into “victory rolls” for Life magazine.

Gloria Swanson wore a dark, smudged kohl greasepaint that encircled her entire eye in Male and Female (1919), but her experiments with bold beauty went beyond her eyes. Swanson also popularized metallic gold and silver nail color, which at the time consisted of powders and pastes rubbed into the nails, since liquid polish did not yet exist. So getting metallic nails involved a little more elbow grease than opening a bottle.

Rita Hayworth was originally named Margarita Cansino. Under orders from Columbia Pictures, she had two years of electrolysis, a process that removes individual hairs using electric current, in order to raise her hairline by about an inch. The studio also dyed her dark hair an auburn color in the movies The Strawberry Blonde (1941) and Gilda (1946). This led to a nationwide trend of women dyeing their hair red.

Josephine Baker’s lacquered “kiss curls,” small curls flattened against her forehead and cheek with setting pomade and fixatives such as egg whites (Siren of the Tropics, 1927), were internationally popular. Her ultrashort Eton crop was too, and both were worn not only by Hollywood actresses but by women on the cabaret circuit as well.

Lucille Ball was no natural redhead; when MGM chief hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff dyed her dark blonde hair for Du Barry Was a Lady in 1942, he created a special color called Titian Red. Max Factor’s studio made special cosmetics to match in its “Redheads Only” makeup room. Yes, there was an entire makeup room for redheads. Ball maintained the look throughout the run of I Love Lucy, which premiered in 1951.

Greta Garbo’s famous deep-set eyes in Mata Hari (1931) weren’t entirely natural. Makeup artist Max Factor had worked a mixture of dark eyeshadow and petroleum jelly into the crease of her lids, but kept the actual lid paler than her skin, which created an illusion of longer, deeper sockets—an early precursor to what’s now called a cut crease.

Elizabeth Taylor brought a sharper-eyed look to Hollywood. She wore heavy black liquid liner with a wing in films like A Place in the Sun (1951) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Her eyebrows were also thick, black, and drawn sharply. The look relied less on soft shading than it had before, but it became one of the hallmark eye styles of the Technicolor period.

In 1938, Joan Bennett dyed her hair a dark brunette for Trade Winds per the request of producer Walter Wanger; she would not dye it back again. In the same year, Hedy Lamarr wore center-parted, cascading dark hair in Algiers. Many historians argue that those two near-simultaneous movies were responsible for a change in Hollywood away from bleached blonde waves to dark hair.

In Rear Window (1954), Grace Kelly’s cheekbones were the product of color rather than contour lines. Makeup artists applied two-tone blush created especially for Technicolor film cameras: darker rose to the hollows of her cheeks, a lighter shade to the apples. The camera got its cheekbones without anyone having to draw brown lines across her face.

Katharine Hepburn’s career was built on a no-makeup persona. As Jo March in Little Women (1933), she was tough-as-nails and athletic and wore minimal makeup. But studio lights burned harshly against bare skin, which is why makeup artists applied an ultra-sheer, non-reflective base coat that created the illusion of a bare face.

When Lauren Bacall was making her first film, To Have and Have Not (1944), she had a tendency to press her chin into her chest and raise her eyes whenever she felt nervous. The makeup department enhanced the pose by extending eyeshadow outward at the corners of her eyes, giving her a soft cat-eye, and defining her eyebrows. Stage fright had accidentally given her a trademark: “The Look.”

Joan Crawford’s mouth took a radical departure from the tiny, daintily drawn lips of the 1920s. To achieve this new look, makeup artist Max Factor applied lipstick in a straight line across Crawford’s top lip. This eliminated her natural Cupid’s bow dip, resulting in a wide, overdrawn mouth dubbed the Hunter’s Bow, or The Smear.

Clara Bow’s minuscule painted mouth was entirely manufactured. Makeup artist Max Factor hand-painted Bow’s Cupid’s bow-shaped lips using greasepaint and lipstick; he painted the color heavily in the middle of her mouth and left the corners of her lips unpainted. The effect was so popular that cosmetics mogul Helena Rubinstein patented a metal lip stencil in 1926 so that any woman could copy the look herself.

Sophia Loren pushed the winged cat-eye look still further. She sported an upturned almond-shaped cat eye in 1957’s Boy on a Dolphin, with a thick black liquid line applied way beyond the corner of her eye, and flicked up toward her eyebrow. It was an update of the winged-liner look Elizabeth Taylor popularized earlier in the decade.

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