A Close Look at Our Collections Journey
One of the many exciting projects currently ongoing at the Wee Museum of Memory is our journey towards accreditation! A big part of this journey is the organization and improvement of the museum’s collection of historical artifacts. Around 10,000 museum objects must be catalogued, labelled, and stored, a process that requires each object to be physically handled by the museum’s staff and volunteers. As of this post, we have successfully processed over 700 objects in just a few short months! As objects work their way through our cataloguing process, many pique the interest of the staff and volunteers who are working through our collection and handling each object.
Some of the objects spark our interest because they seem particularly unfamiliar, a relic of a bygone era, while others, for the opposite reason, remind us of our own past. Others have stories attached, provided by their donors, often filled with mysteries that inspire curiosity about those who lived before us. This blog series is designed to give each of those objects a space to shine while also letting you in on our progress towards accreditation!
Want to explore our collections from home?
We’re working hard to improve our collections and store our objects properly so they are available for future generations too! However, at the Wee Museum of Memory, we don’t want objects to be stashed away in storage shelves, but instead we try to put most of our collection out on the museum floor so you can come see them in person. Now we are also moving our collections online. This way, our objects are even more accessible. You can explore and reminisce through our objects from home, and also take a peek at what we have in storage through our online collection. If you want to look at the objects we have uploaded so far, click below!
At first glance, many of the objects held in the Wee Museum of Memory’s collection might look like something you’d find at the back of your grandmother’s cupboard, or mentioned in one of her childhood stories, rather than the glamorous artifacts you might initially expect in museum collections. When you think about museum collections, many of us might conjure up something out of the films Indiana Jones or Night at the Museum, images of huge warehouses stacked with rows of huge wooden crates filled with priceless artifacts. Those films portray a dazzling picture of museum archives and collections, and while this sentiment certainly captures how incredibly interesting museum collections can be, in the real world, impressive, luxurious artifacts really only reveal the history of those who could afford to own them.
The artifacts featured in this Hollywood-afied image of a museum collection, like golden goblets, bejewelled crowns, and imposing swords, tell the stories of history’s powerful. If we want to hear other stories, those of the less powerful and less well-known, those of everyday people, we have to take a look at the ‘ordinary’ objects that made up their lives. These are the kind of objects that the Wee Museum of Memory keeps both on display and in its collections. Our objects are often acquired with specific local memories attached and inspire our museum visitors, who might connect these objects to their own past, to reminisce. These ‘normal’ objects once sat in kitchens, school rooms, workplace benches, or other ‘ordinary’ spaces, and witnessed the happy days and the rough times of the everyday people who owned them.
Beauty Under the Floorboards
Five boxes of hair product held in our collections
The first objects that we’ve chosen to look at are five tiny cardboard boxes filled with sets of glass hair dye bottles. While they might appear quite unassuming at first, when you look a little closer, they are almost like little windows, which allow us to glimpse a piece of daily life in the past through them. Surprisingly, these little boxes of hair product have quite a mysterious story attached to them, a story we can reimagine if we peer through them into the past.
Four of the boxes are L’Oreal Imedia Hair Tint. While L’Oreal is a recognizable modern brand, one look reveals that these particular dyes come from a time long gone by. The four L’Oreal Imedia boxes and dyes date from the 1930s. The fifth box, Nusheen Instant Retouch Liquid, is a lesser-known brand that also dates from the 1930s. Curiously, the original Nusheen product is no longer inside the box and was, at one point, replaced by another bottle of L’Oreal Imedia dye. The illustration on the outside of the Nusheen box reflects the beauty standards of the time: thin brows, heavily rouged cheeks, and hair cut into a bob.
Learn more about the origins of L’Oréal
Imedia was one of the first revolutionary hair-care lines created by the just-blossoming L’Oréal company in the 1930s, born in response to a world where women were now clamoring into salons to get the latest fashions in vogue. L’Oreal’s founder, chemist Eugène Schueller, created his first product, a safe synthetic hair dye, in 1909 and named it ‘L’Auréale’, potentially inspired by the popular Auréole hairstyle, which involved wearing the hair like a “halo” around the head. The company only later officially became L’Oreal.
The Bob
was the in vogue hairstyle of the 1920s and 30s. For centuries, Western women had worn their hair long. The bob, which first appeared in the 1910s, began as a rebellious statement of anti-traditionalism and individuality. The hairstyle came to be associated with flapper girls who turned traditional femininity on its head and famously disregarded the social norm. This meant, of course, that many people initially opposed the bob and its connotations of rebellion. However, the popularization of the hairstyle by celebrities such as Louise Brooks, Josephine Baker (who was known for wearing one of the most daring bob styles, the Eton bob), and Clara Bow meant that women were flocking to salons for the cut by the 1920s. The bob had entered the mainstream. To explore some of the many bob styles popular in the 1920s and 30s, click here.
The illustrated woman on the Nusheen box looks like she is sporting either the Charleston Cut or the Shingle version of the bob, and has styled it in Marcel or finger waves. Marcel waves were created using a Marcel curling iron, a handheld metal curling device originally heated over a fire and then clamped around the hair to create long-lasting waves. Finger waves were created by pinching and combing hair into an S-shape flat along the head, then setting them with a styling lotion.
To many women in the 1930s, and likely the past owner of the five hair product boxes in our collection, this illustrated woman would have been the pinnacle of current fashions. While women were striving to achieve this fashionable look, it was also heavily criticized by some. These competing sentiments created a tension for women, who were both encouraged by beauty corporations to subscribe to the new beauty standards of the rapidly changing 1930s and also told to resist them by others.
The three images below, from the Wee Museum of Memory’s own collection of photographs, show real women in the 1920s sporting the bob. The “unknown woman,” photographed in 1925, has styled her hair in waves and likely used a marcel iron or the finger waves technique.
Want to explore more photos?
We have a photo collection of over 5,000 images online and open to the public! Click below if you’d like to take a look at the rest of the collection.
At the same time that women were cutting their hair up to their ears, hair dye became increasingly more popular. Just like the bob, flapper girls were some of the first to dye their hair in noticeable ways. However, many women were partaking in private to cover up greys or subtly change their colour, even though it was often seen as a hallmark of a promiscuous girl. Although the stigma had relaxed significantly by the 1930s and many women were openly dyeing their hair, many still wanted to hide it. Brands recognized this and often chose to advertise their dyes as tints to entice women who were scared of “dyes.”
You can see this sales technique in the five hair products in our collection. The Nusheen product specifically mentions it is “not a dye” and claims to wash out with shampoo, while the L’Oreal boxes are advertised as tints, not dyes. Perhaps the real woman who owned these hair products in the 1930s felt the tension of wanting to change the colour of her hair, but not wanting to reveal or admit that she was using dyes.
The most mysterious aspect of these specific boxes is the fact that they were discovered under the floorboards of a bungalow in the Granton area of Edinburgh during a renovation. Their discovery, almost like little boxes of buried treasure dug up from the floorboards, immediately makes you question who hid them and why. What kind of pressures led them to be hidden? Was their owner embarrassed? Were they secretly dyeing their hair?
Perhaps a young girl desperately wanted to dye her hair like the fashionable older girls at her school or the movie stars she saw in cinemas and advertisements. Maybe her parents forbade her from dyeing her hair because they considered it too mature for a girl her age. Maybe she wanted the in-vogue look so badly that she scrounged together various bottles from her mother’s bathroom cupboards or enlisted her friends at school to pinch some from their own mothers. Maybe this young girl never worked up the courage to oppose her parents’ no-dye policy, and so the stolen dyes were forgotten beneath the floor.
Or maybe a woman entering her later years felt the ever-growing pressures to maintain her youth through modern artificial means, and so purchased the dye to hide the grey hairs peeking out along her hairline. Maybe she didn’t want to admit that she was going grey. Or maybe she didn’t want to admit that she was subscribing to the new world of artificial beauty, and so hid the evidence under the floor.
Could it have been that someone disliked the fact that their wife or daughter was dyeing their hair and so hid them away? Or maybe someone was jealous of her sister’s coloured hair and so stashed them away and forgot about them.
While we can’t say for sure who hid them or the reason why, these five small boxes of hair product have connected them to us decades later. Someone decades ago was likely facing the same pressures and embarrassment that many of us face today in a world where the beauty standard continues to climb to unachievable heights.
By looking at objects like these, we can relate to those who lived in the past. Their worries and joys are often not so different to out own. Its this connection between the past and the present that can make the exploration of these everyday objects so interesting.
If you want to hear more about some of the other intriguing objects in our collection and stay up to date with our cataloguing journey, stay tuned for our next blog post!
