Grandma
always told us a lady should sacrifice comfort for beauty. She also
liked to remind us that she was 118-pounds when she got married. Come
to think of it, she often told us not to look at Black people funny or
they'd shoot us, so maybe we shouldn't have listened to the
sacrificing-comfort-for-beauty part. Still, we do, to an extent — you
know if it means not eating a cheeseburger and fries three times a day
even though we want to, and squeezing into jeans that make it hard to
breathe.
Anyway, Grandma would have been only 18 when this "Face
Harness for Milady's Beauty" was advertised in 1933, and we know she
was hit hard by The Great Depression, so she probably didn't have one.
And if she did, and gave it away, that would break our hearts, because
imagine going through Grandma's costume jewelry after she died (which
we most certainly did), and finding this. We wouldn't have the first
clue what to do with it. First guess would have been some weird
pre-vibrator, electric-shock, orgasm-producing underwear. And we'd have thought Grandma to be very, very cool. But if she'd
kept the newspaper clip...
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