Max Factor's thirties weirdness

 

EVEN BEAUTY MAY NOW BE REDUCED TO COLD HARD FIGURES

 The nominal Max Factor cosmetics corporation was christened after this old-school makeup mogul. Back in the golden days of Hollywood this guy perfected the faces of a lot of the screen's big wheels and, like many others at the time, developed some delightfully bizarre experiments in the 1930s and 1940s. The "beauty micrometer" is one such example- and not so far off at all from a similar device the Nazis would later use to locate and specify Aryan features. Max Factor, however, was a Polish Jew.