25 Vintage Cosmetics Ads from Japan

Illustrated ads for the Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido, 1925–60

1939 These scans are courtesy (again) of Jimoto at Dassaishooku, and also of Gennifer Weisenfeld and MIT. From Gennifer Weisenfeld's essay "Selling Shiseido: Cosmetics Advertising & Design in Early 20th-Century Japan":The 20th-century history of the Shiseido cosmetics company provides a vivid image of the efflorescence of modernity in Japan—reflecting the changing ideals of feminine beauty, the emergence of a vibrant consumer culture, cutting-edge trends in advertising and packaging, and the persistence of cosmopolitan ideals even in the midst of the rise of militarism in the 1930s. This unit draws on Shiseido’s vast archives, focusing on the marketing of concepts of modern beauty from the 1920s through 1943, when wartime exigencies eventually curtailed the promotion of an international aesthetic of worldly chic. [...] There is no Japanese company whose advertising design better represents the aesthetic of cosmopolitan chic seen throughout the visual sphere in early 20th-century Japan than Shiseido. The Shiseido cosmetics company opened its Western-style pharmaceutical business in Tokyo in 1872 and a few decades later, under the banner of its stylish camellia logo and signature arabesque designs, emerged as one of the leading cosmetics manufacturers in Japan, a position it still holds over a century later. I got in touch with Prof. Weisenfeld a couple years ago for help with an image from MAVO. Check out her books MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 and Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923.