Vintage 1960s-1970s Pin Up Pocket Mirror 💄 Made in Japan Portrait Auburn Updo Dime-Store Collectible

Who Is She? 🪞 Vintage 1960s-1970s Pin-Up Pocket Mirror, Made in Japan

Size: 2" ~ a round plastic-rim pocket mirror, printing still bright, reflective glass intact.

Nobody has ever put a name to her. There's no name on the mirror, no studio and no maker - just her face and the word JAPAN - and her photograph doesn't turn up anywhere else. Not in a magazine, not on a record sleeve, not on another mirror. As far as anyone can tell, this little two-inch disc is where her picture lives.

And that's exactly why I love it. In those years thousands of young women went after stardom - models, would-be starlets, girls who landed a line or two in a B movie - and plenty of them sat for glamour portraits like this one, hoping a pretty picture on a magazine page or a dime-store mirror would be the break that got them noticed. Most of those names are lost now. Maybe she made it under another name. Maybe she went home and never looked back. Either way, you get to wonder about her every time you check your lipstick.

So, which one is yours? The auburn updo on pink, or the sleek slicked-back look on blue?

🔍 Our Three Best Guesses

Nobody can say for certain who she is, so here are the three faces she gets matched with most. Take your pick:

• Isabella Rossellini - the blue one especially. The slicked-back hair, the pearl earring and that calm, level gaze look a lot like the Lancôme ads she fronted from 1982 to 1996. If it's her, your mirror is an '80s piece.
• Tippi Hedren - the swept-up roll on the pink one has the polished Hitchcock-heroine look of The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964).
• Debra Paget - the name the trade has pinned on these for years. She was a 1950s 20th Century Fox star and Elvis Presley's leading lady in Love Me Tender (1956).

My own vote changes depending on which one I'm holding.

💋 The Pin-Up, the Dream Factory, and All Those Hopefuls

Hollywood ran on pretty faces, and it always needed new ones. Back in 1922 the studio publicity men - the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers - started picking thirteen young actresses a year they swore were on the threshold of stardom, the WAMPAS Baby Stars. Nearly 150 girls got that title before the program ended in 1934. A handful became legends; Ginger Rogers and Joan Crawford were both Baby Stars. Most of the rest are names nobody remembers.

Then came the war, and the pin-up. In 1943 Betty Grable stood for a studio photographer in a one-piece bathing suit and smiled back over her shoulder, and that one picture became the most requested photo of World War II. Her studio sent out more than five million copies to servicemen. Every girl with a dream understood the lesson: one great photograph could make you.

The hunt never stopped. From 1953 Hollywood's makeup artists and hair stylists crowned ten "Deb Stars" a year at a big annual ball, their picks for the most promising newcomers in town. Kim Novak, Tuesday Weld and Raquel Welch came out of those classes. Plenty of others posed, smiled, sat for portrait after portrait - and then slipped quietly out of the business.

That's the world this mirror comes from. A beautiful young woman in a glamour portrait, printed on a dime-store mirror, with no name anywhere. Maybe she was a model. Maybe she was a hopeful with a contract and a dream. We'll probably never know - and honestly, that's what makes her so much fun to own.

🪞 Two Portraits, Two Rims

These come in two versions, and they're two different pictures, not one image in two colors. The "Red" mirror shows a woman with honey-auburn hair swept into a high rolled updo, smoky eye makeup and glossy lips, on a pink-magenta ground in a red plastic rim. The "Blue" mirror is a different portrait: dark hair slicked back, a pale pearl earring and a high cream funnel-neck collar on a blue ground, and its rim is white. Both carry "JAPAN" in small black type at the base of the picture, and nothing else, no name, studio or maker.

🌏 The JAPAN Mark

The "Made in Occupied Japan" wording was required on Japanese exports for only about two and a half years. General Douglas MacArthur, who ran the occupation as Supreme Commander, had his headquarters order it on February 20, 1947, and drop it on December 5, 1949. After that a plain "JAPAN" was allowed again, and the portraits themselves are the look of the late 1960s and 70s.

That one little word ties it to a big trade. When civilian trade reopened in 1947, Japan's factories started shipping ceramics, lacquerware, metalwork, toys and cameras overseas, most of it to the United States, and Woolworth's American company had its buying office in Japan open again before the occupation was even over. U.S. military orders during the Korean War, 1950 to 1953, set off boom times in Japanese industry, and by the end of the '50s Japan had become a tin-toy powerhouse. Right after the war the American papers wrote Japanese goods off as cheap gimcracks; by the mid-1950s, as the quality climbed, they were worrying about them as competition, and in December 1957 Sony brought its TR-63 pocket transistor radio to the States. A two-inch mirror with JAPAN at the foot of the portrait is a pocket-sized piece of that story.

💄 A Different Look From the Starlet Mirrors

Two-inch plastic-rim portrait mirrors with a face on one side are a familiar dime-store type, and the best-known run is a 1950s series of starlets done as tinted halftone studio portraits, among them Shirley Jones, who became Laurey in the 1955 film of Oklahoma! These are something else: color fashion photographs with heavy contoured eye makeup, and a white rim that series never used. I love them for exactly that. They're little pieces of a vanity table from those years, and a hard one to find.