Maybelline vintage ad model Ethel Clayton, 1915.

Mabel Williams was the inspiriation and face for Lash-Brow-Ine ads in 1915, followed by silent film star, Ethel Clayton.

Mabel Williams

Ethel Clayton

Ethel Clayton (November 8, 1882 — June 6, 1966) was an American actress of the silent film era. Clayton's screen debut came in 1909, in a short called Justified. She jockeyed her early film appearances with a burgeoning stage career. Her pretty blond looks were reminiscient of the famous Gibson Girl drawings by Charles Dana Gibson. On the stage she appeared mainly in musicals or musical reviews such as The Ziegfeld Follies of 1911. These musical appearances indicate a singing talent Clayton may have possessed but went unused in her many silent screen performances.

Read more about Mabel Williams and her tremendous contribution to brother, Tom Lyle Williams, Maybelline Company, in the Maybelline Story.

Pick up your copy of The Maybelline Story and the Spirited Family Dynasty Behind It at Barnes and Nobel, Amazon, or buy a signed copy from maybellinestory.com.  Also now available on Kindle and ebook for the Nook.

Maybelline's little sister Lash-Brow-Ine in 1915.

                                       Before Maybelline
                 there was Lash-Brow-Ine.

"Before and After" ad for Lash-Brow-Ine, 1915.

 In 1915, women were just starting to accept cosmetics again, after avoiding them during the Victorian era. Creams and powders prevailed on the market; however, eye make-up remained all but taboo.  In England, social constraints against cosmetics, including lash color, persisted well into the Victorian age, though business was brisk in back-alley beauty services. 

Proper English ladies of the nineteenth century considered
make–up to be off-limits, the province of prostitutes whose penchant for cosmetics earned them the label “painted women.”  Viewed as appropriate only for prostitutes and music-hall performers, make-up was so forbidden in
Victorian society a man could divorce his wife for wearing it.

Directions inside a box of Lash-Brow-Ine, 1915.

While the American colonies were under British rule, the use of white powder, rouge and lipstick was brisk. After the revolution, cosmetics became political. For example, an unpainted face was a sign of a good Republican.
Women were expected to pinch their cheeks and bite their lips if they hoped to brighten their faces. Men enjoyed greater leeway. They could and did, dye and condition their air, mustaches and sideburns, often with a touch-up dye for graying hair called Mascaro, from which Tom Later derived the word mascara.

Yet, the onset of the silent movies in the early 1900’s was changing the way society viewed cosmetics, as alluring actresses such as Theda Bara and other screen stars glamorized the painted look once associated with prostitution.

Theda Bara as Cleopatra, in 1917

Women began to enter the work force and began to build independent lives for themselves, making fashion and beauty a bit more robust.  At the same time, women were beginning to organize for their political rights, holding suffragist rallies for right to vote. In New York in 1913, more than one parade of Suffragettes marched down Fifth Avenue past a salon owned by a woman named Elizabeth Arden.  Arden in New York, along with Helena Rubinstein in England, opened the first beauty salons in the cosmetics business, specializing solely in skin products.


Read more about the birth of Lash-Brow-Ine and Maybelline in The Maybelline Story and the Spirited Family Dynasty Behind It.  You can now purchase an autographed cope directly from me by clicking on maybellinestory.com under the picture of the book. 

I will be posting my radio interview on Voice America next Monday, and will be doing the Dare to Dream radio show on May 11th.  Stay tuned for more exciting tid bits and Maybelline trivia from those wonderful days gone by.