We haven't done any History of Beauty in ages, so here's a little tidbit to start us off.
In the 1920s an innovative product was invented by a fella called Leo Gerstenzang in New York. His company marketed baby care accessories and these little sticks of wood, topped with cotton were used to clean baby's ears after a bath. Hilariously, to us now, they were first called Baby Gays. You can see the reasoning - they were for babies and they made said babies happy because their ears were clean. Hence - Baby Gays. Leo made the name even more fancy a few years later and changed it to Quality-tips Baby Gays.
For obvious reasons the whole Baby Gay part of the name was dropped. Perhaps people felt uncomfortable cleaning out their earwax, or putting on eyeshadow with a Baby Gay? (I can't believe that anyone DOES put on eyeshadow with one of these though, but apparently it's not unheard of).
Unileaver own Baby Gays now and they call them Q-tips. They sell a mind boggling 25.5 billion of these things a year.
Advertised
Ah, that's got that useless beauty fact off my chest now.
