Marilyn Monroe's Beauty Secret: Out with Nuts, Clams, and Chocolate
The New York Makeup Museum opens its first exhibition with a section dedicated to the actress whose beauty has become an icon
In New York this May, the Makeup Museum was inaugurated, although for the moment its opening has been delayed due to the coronavirus. In her first exhibition, called Pink Jungle - 1950's Makeup in America, she showed, as you can see on her social media, Marilyn's skincare regimen. Monroe.
Like so many women, the protagonist of Niagara and other famous films practiced daily rituals to obtain healthy and radiant skin. One of the museum's videos shows the morning routine of her trusted dermatologist, Erno Laszlo, who also had princesses and many stars like Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn among her clients.
After cleansing his face with water and Phelityl Cleansing bar soap (made from natural oils and essential fatty acids), Laszlo prescribed the Normalizer Shake-It neutral toner with cotton wool. Then, Laszlo continues, he would apply a cream called Phelitone in small amounts to the eye area and finish the treatment with the Duo-pHase face powder moisturizer.
The secret to glowing skin like the star's was to cleanse your face, lips, and neck at night with Phelityl oil, always using cotton soaked in the product. In the morning the face was washed and once dry the cream, also Phelityl, was applied to the face and neck, avoiding the eye area, which was immediately removed with a lotion.
To help the skin, Erno Laszlo prescribed Marilyn Monroe to avoid nuts, chocolate, olives, oysters, and clams. It was not a great sacrifice for the diva, that she did not give up milk, ice cream, eggs, liver and steaks, and she loved raw carrots, which she ate in large quantities.
“We love to look back and draw inspiration from our rich heritage as we move forward. [The cosmetic firm] Erno Laszlo was founded by the world's first skin doctor and we were often associated with cultural icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, both clients during the 1950s, "says Kristy Watson, current marketing director for Erno Laszlo.
Pink Jungle: 1950's Makeup in America refers to the 1950s, when cosmetics became commercialized and great actresses of the moment became the best brand ambassadors and, little by little, the industry became what we know today. "The 1950s is the perfect period to launch the first museum exhibit because that decade coincides with the birth of the modern cosmetic industry," says Doreen Bloch, Makeup Museum's CEO and co-founder, in a statement.
It was the film industry that made lipstick fashionable, and hence a battle arose between cosmetic companies to get the perfect lipstick. In 1958 Time magazine referred to this moment as The Pink Jungle, and for that reason the museum has taken that same name for its first exhibition.
The museum will be open at 94 Gansevoort Street in New York for six months. Later they will look for a new location in which to settle permanently and they also want to make the leap to other cities on an itinerant basis by 2021. In the meantime, they will carry out temporary exhibitions that span the different decades after 1950.
