LIQUID SILK STOCKINGS! GIVES BARE LEGS THE ELEGANCE OF SHEEN SILK. (SUFFICIENT FOR 24 APPLICATIONS)
Legliner? the suppressed supply of nylon stockings (because, war) lead to women mimicking stockings by drawing them onto their legs with… eyeliner.
With eyes being the most expressive facial features, people have used eyeliner to define their eyes and other facial features surrounding the eyes for decades. Eyeliner History dates way back—specifically 3000BC, in Egypt—and a wide variety of eyeliner trends have come and gone by since then—From the bold kohl eyeliner sported by Nefertiti to Doniella Davy’s colour-and-shape-frenzy-style eyeliner on HBO’s Euphoria’s cast. My random choice of research on eyeliner resulted in my stumbling across a Youtube video titled '100 Years of eyeliner' where the initially ridiculous-sounding concept of using eyeliner on legs being a trend, obviously stood out to me. Eyeliner on legs is a bit ridiculous they’ve got to be kidding.
They weren’t. Yeah, Eyeliner was really used to draw stockings onto legs. This was during a war in 1939 of which I will spare you the details (there’s already enough whitewashed history education in existence and besides, I don’t really sport that kinda niche). all the manufacturer resources were basically dedicated towards the war at hand. The production of non stockings, which were already high in demand, slowed too and they became really scarce. This gave rise to Liquid Stockings.
They even coined a whole term around it. It was a pretty serious business. With an entire industry behind it, naturally, a bunch of propaganda promoting the product flew around the place.
Advanced users of legliner got even more realistic by using black eyeliner pencils to draw on the “seam.”
You’d find leg makeup bars in public areas where women lined up to get their legs drawn on. You had to prepare for that though, with the prep being 'similar to that of the preparation for a fake tan'.
The only record of the trend being through Eurocentric beauty products and the industry around that almost certainly threw my interest off. But I did find the concept of makeup of a nature seemingly that bizarre trending interesting. It makes me wonder what a body makeup trend outside leg tanning, body defining and fake stockings would look like. The idea of accentuating necks, collar bones, hips & waists, arms, anything more than just the eyes and face does sounds pretty enticing in an "oh i want to try that" way.
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