1950 - Everyday Life

Everyday Life

The Rolodex is introduced by Brooklyn, N.Y.-born inventor Arnold Neustadter, 40, who has attached alphabetized cards to an easily dialed cylinder, creating a device that will grow to have sales of nearly 10 million units per year worldwide.

Las Vegas hails the opening of the Desert Inn hotel-casino that will survive until September 2000 with 715 rooms, intimate wood-paneled decor, a swimming pool, an 18-hole golf course, big-name entertainers in its Crystal Showroom, and room service that includes amenities such as gold-handled champagne buckets (see Flamingo, 1946). Entrepreneur Wilbur Clark has built the place with help from Detroit "businessman" Moe Dalitz.

Cotton fiber's share of U.S. textile production rises to 85 percent, up from 68 percent in 1940, and man-made fibers—mostly rayons and acetates—decrease their share to 15 percent (see 1960).

U.S. tennis player Gussie Moran shocks many in the stands at Wimbledon by wearing lace underwear that shows every time she swings her racquet. Tennis fashion designer Theodore "Ted" Tinling, 39, has designed the panties as a response to Wimbledon's ban on colored tennis attire.

Style arbiter Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendl) dies at Versailles July 12 at age 84.

The acne treatment Clearasil Ointment introduced by the U.S. firm Combs Chemical Co., has benzoyl peroxide as its active ingredient. The "unsightly blemishes" of acne affect 85 percent of teenagers at one time or another as male hormone production increases in girls as well as boys; the hormones spur growth of body hair and of the skin's sebaceous glands. When the glands produce too much sebum, it can form a blackhead, which is not dirt but simply oil compacted in a pore; the sebum may back up and rupture sebum-duct walls, forming a pimple that becomes infected, and the infection may spread in a red blotch around the blocked duct.

Hoboken, N.J.-born cosmetics maker Hazel (Gladys) Bishop, 44, introduces the first no-smear lipstick. "Never again need you be embarrassed by smearing friends, children, relatives, husbands, sweetheart," her advertisements say, and her lipstick, priced at $1 per tube, finds immediate acceptance when introduced at New York's Lord & Taylor. Formulated with bromo-acid colorants that have staining power, it will soon capture 25 percent of the market.

Miss Clairol is introduced by Clairol Co., whose one-step hair coloring kit takes half the application time needed by other hair colorings (see 1931). LIFE magazine estimates that 10 million U.S. women are tinting their hair (see 1956).