I vividly recall seeing an ad for Body Paint back in 1967* in one of my mother’s women’s magazines. The model was applying it with a miniature paint roller. I thought it was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen, which was almost certainly the point. To the best of my knowledge, nobody ever used this stuff. I never saw it anywhere, and it made no waves outside the ad. I wonder if anyone actually bought and wore it?
Here’s the ad:
Apparently a lot of other people recall and wonder about that ad, because I find a lot of references to Coty Originals Body Paint on search engines:
Anybody else remember this? Anybody know anything more about it (and if anybody they knew actually tried it?) It looks like a fashion industry attempt to “tame” the hippy use of body paint.
*I recall the year clearly because Expo 67 was going on in Montreal, and I was reading the ad in a car heading there. There wasn’t a lot of reading material in the car, and I’d exhausted the magazines I brought myself.
Here’s a video from 1967 of actress Caroline Munro (she later appeared in a lot of “fantastic” cinema, like Ray Harryhausen’s Golden Voyage of Sinbad) getting body painted with the Coty’s stuff after swimming I the Serpentine in London:
I had a friend with an older sister who had that stuff and would put it before going out to party. She would roll it on to her legs and draw on her face with her finger. I instantly fell in love with that girl.
I’ve heard of “leg makeup” circa WWII when stockings got expensive and women drew a “seam” down the backs of their bare legs. Other’n that, I got nothing.
Yeah, that comes up in websites about body paint, but the two cases are diametrically opposed – WWII “leg paint” was used to give the impression of clothes you weren’t wearing (because you couldn’t afford the stockings). Coty body paint was apparently supposed to be obvious and “out there”.
It was a ‘thing’ in the 60s, all the hippy dippy stuff. Remember the girls on Laugh-In that would dance around in bikini’s and body paint? And the girl in Goldfinger allegedly suffocated from a coating of gold paint.
I had several acquaintances back then who were into body painting, but not with a roller. And I think they just used any paint that happened to be lying around.
