It's a 1920s May!

Somehow this month has morphed into some kind of crazy 1920s season! "The Great Gatsby" has, of course, sparked a lot of this. But for me personally there's one other reason!
A theatre company I help with the wardrobe department for is doing a production of Sandy Wilson's "The Boy Friend". It's a show that has been performed on the West End and Broadway - the Original Broadway Cast included Julie Andrews in the main role of Polly Browne!

The main focus on this production has been making it as accurate as possible. The acting style, dancing, singing, everything has been made as 1920s style as possible to match with the comical libretto and score.

The section of the production that has interested me most is the costume, of course. Stockings, 1920s knickers (as can be seen in the photo above), and the flat line of the body. The pretty drop-waist dresses, and pulling cloche hats down to the eyebrows- it'll be fun next week fixing up these things in the wardrobe department! However, this show has made me interested in something else - the hair an makeup!

Using descriptions of how it was done in a book about the show, plus using photos from theVintageThimble.tumblr.com, I had a go at it for myself!

 I did some quick photo editing to make it look like an old black and white photo, but with my short hair, I think I did okay!

It was pretty experimental, but these are roughly the steps I took:
1. use the foundation like normal, but cover the edges of the lips, or even all the lips.
2. around the entire eye, use black eyeliner. I didn't use any on the waterline though, and I think liquid eyeliner would work better than the pencil I used.
3. Put lipstick on. I only did the central area of my lips, and as I have a thin upper lip I extended above. (I don't know much about makeup and I'm sure there's a real term for that). I used a dark purple-red lipstick f that.
4. I doubt this is historically accurate, but I thought it looked nice with quite bright red lipgloss applied over the lipstick - probably that teenage brain of mine!
5. added light blusher on the cheeks.
6. mascara - in the book I read, they'd had to drip wax onto their eyelashes for the West End production in 1954!

I think it's much more historically accurate to use a sort of dark red lipstick, and to use eyeshadow and eyebrow pencil. However as I said, I was being experimental! 

I hope this quick tutorial/random post is okay - I didn't feel up to editing my next review. I feel like learning about makeup through history could be especially useful for me to complete costumes!