How did our mothers and grandmothers manage to remain fairies, actively participating in the building of communism?
“You can be an efficient person and think about the beauty of your nails.” The great poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin did not even suspect that in a little over a hundred years this phrase would most accurately describe the life of a woman in Soviet Russia. What did women’s beauty hygiene have in the Land of the Soviets?
The “Rabotnitsa” magazine and Soviet books for women about beauty and health reminded me: working for the good of the Motherland, one should not forget about the need to groom your hands.
Manicure in the USSR was done of only one type – edged. The Soviet “Marya-masters”, who obtained good professional tweezers, could serve themselves, since nail files and small scissors were sold in haberdashery departments both individually and in sets.
However, if desired, it was possible to process nails at the master, the service cost 35 kopecks. At hairdressing salons in the USSR, there were small cosmetology and manicure and pedicure rooms, where women of fashion went to take care of their face and hands.
The technology of the trimmed manicure procedure has not changed now: before processing, the hands are kept in warm soapy water, after the cuticle and keratinized areas of the skin around the nail were removed, the hands were massaged with cream. Many people still remember the unpretentious smells of Soviet-made creams – “Yantar”, “Velor”, “Lanolinovy”.
The master served the clients, dressed in a white robe; in the hairdressing salons of the USSR, all employees dressed like that.
As for the decorative coating, in the Brezhnev era, the assortment of nail varnishes did not please with a variety. A transparent or slightly pinkish base, red and a few dull shades of brown and pink – that’s all that the Soviet perfumery industry had to offer. These coatings also did not differ in durability, so they used a red tone only on holidays, on weekdays they preferred pale shades.
High-quality varnishes of juicy, “complex” tones seeped into the USSR from abroad, for example, with “visiting” creative teams, sailors, employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and so on. Such goods could be purchased from individuals, or from “professional” speculators.
However, in the well-known department stores of both capitals, sometimes imported nail polishes, for example, the French brand “Lancom” or the Polish one, were thrown away.
In special rooms at hairdressing salons or baths, women could also do a pedicure. This service was inexpensive, but was in slightly less demand than manicure.
The technology is well-known: the feet were steamed in hot water with soap, then they were slightly dried with a towel and processed. For the edged (for there was no other) pedicure, metal graters, tweezers, scissors were used. Some clients recall with a shudder how the “corn operators” scraped their coarse heels with simple razors – there was such a terrible method in the Soviet beauty industry!
But more often than not, a practical Soviet woman managed the pedicure herself, using an ordinary pumice stone for this. A piece of pumice was found in almost every Soviet bathroom in the 70s and 80s.
The attitude to hair removal in different parts of the vast Soviet country was uneven. Let’s start with the fact that at that time they did not know such a word – epilation. This narrowly professional term was used only by cosmetologists.
The Soviet woman did not do any hair removal, she simply shaved her legs with a machine. The razor was untwisted and “charged” with the fresh blade of the “Neva”. A little shaving cream or soap suds and off you go! It was a versatile, cheap way to achieve smooth legs, armpits and bikini lines.
More “advanced” women in the USSR bought a Persian powder for destroying hair called “Nuri” based on therapeutic mud in pharmacies. It was diluted with water into a paste, applied to the desired areas of the body and dried, after which it was cleaned off along with the collapsed hairs from the skin with a special spatula. This pasta had a nasty smell, they say.
Refined ladies also chased after the French hair removal cream “Bocage”, it also had a non-perfumed smell, but knew his business.
The funny thing is that many women in the USSR in general did not bother themselves with such subtleties as removing unwanted vegetation, believing that all these were tricks from the arsenal of bourgeois cocottes. And they went to the beach with “natural” legs and armpits. And, as we can observe, the human race did not stop because of this.
Already in the 80s, almost on the eve of the collapse of the Land of the Soviets, beauty salons began to offer laser hair removal services, but it was very expensive.
But if in the 70s some Soviet women could not pay attention to some extra hairs on the body and not achieve sculptural smoothness, then one detail of the appearance definitely required correction.
“The eyebrow should be as thin as a thread raised in surprise,” secretary Verochka taught her boss Lyudmila Prokofievna in the famous film “Office Romance” by Eldar Ryazanov. Therefore, our mothers plucked their eyebrows – either from the master, or themselves. Either with tweezers, or, as the secretary Verochka taught, with a drawing pen.