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

Size: 2 inches ~ a round plastic-rim pocket mirror, printing still bright, reflective glass intact. They vary a little one to the next.

🪞 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.

💄 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.