Meet the new face of a bygone age of beauty

It was running out of gift ideas which inspired Jane Johnston to indulge her passion for glamour and vintage and set up a business restoring and selling powder compacts.

Since then her passion has become something of an obsession. They were a glamorous and essential beauty item of the 1950s. Now pressed and loose face powder compacts are enjoying a comeback.

Jane, who runs her business from her kitchen table in Halifax, scours the world looking for special examples before cleaning and restoring them and then selling them through her business, Vanroe Compacts.

“I saw the gap for vintage compacts that fit modern powders when I remembered a gorgeous example I’d seen growing up in Accrington. I’d often wished I could go back and buy it as a perfect present.” In the rather unglamorous surroundings of her mid-terraced house in Halifax, where she juggles bringing up two young sons, beauty from a bygone era adorns her kitchen table.

The intricate works of art remind me of my grandmother, whose generation would not be seen dead without a powder compact as they strived to recreate the Hollywood look of the 1950s. Now, as we are all more aware of waste and packaging and the vintage obsession shows no signs of abating, the compact is seeing a resurgence. But for Jane it is much more than just a business. A physicist with a degree from Oxford, Jane is fascinated by the history and the mechanics of the compacts she lovingly and painstakingly restores.

Two of the leading brands were Kigu, started by a Hungarian goldsmith, and British manufacturer Stratton – known for patenting a self-opening mechanism so women didn’t chip their nail varnish. “If you talk to any woman over 70 she would have had a Stratton bought for her. They were massive in their day and at their peak they had four factories exporting all over the world. From the 1930s to the ‘50s the compacts held loose powder, with a sifter.”

If Jane cannot clean the delicate sifter then she has learnt how to make her own.

“I source the compacts from antiques fairs and markets all over the world. I professionally clean and restore every vintage compact to the highest standards. Fifty year-old powder compacts are glamorous, but 50 year-old powder is not!” Pressed powder was introduced in the early 1960s and Stratton, always ahead of the rest, patented a compact which could use both loose or pressed powder. They had also developed a machanism which enabled women to open their compact with just one hand. But by the mid- 1980s powder campacts went out of fashion and Stratton diversified. However the company still exists and Jane has started to source new compacts from them which she sells via her web-based business. And she has even started to design her own compacts which Stratton is going to produce.

“I wanted the range to reflect my two loves, Stratton powder compacts and heritage textiles. The lids are made from traditional cotton, printed and finished in a family-run mill in Yorkshire,” explains Jane. who is asking visitors to her website to vote for their favourite which she then hopes to put in production later this year.

Jane first got into vintage glamour when she was just 10 years old. “I was something of a geek,” she confesses.

“I would watch the old Hollywood movies and love the glamour, the make-up and clothes. I used to visit an amazing vintage shop in Accrington. I was a lot bigger when I was younger and just couldn’t wear the crop tops that everyone else was wearing. So I would buy something from the vintage shop and feel glamorous like the actresses in the films I watched. There was also a compact in that shop which I wished I’d bought and always regretted that I didn’t especially when my friends started having babies and I was looking for presents for them.” But it wasn’t really until Jane started to have her own family and was looking to start her own business that she remembered that compact.

After leaving university where she met her husband, Alistair, Jane worked for a London software company helping them market their technologies.

“I was travelling the world and talking to people who all owned their own businesses and knew that one day that’s what I wanted.” She was eight months pregnant with her first son, Billy, when the couple decided to move to Yorkshire .

“I’d always loved costume and design even while I was studying at university and I think that’s one of the reasons the compacts appealed.”

She had already started collecting and renovating compacts for friends but then the word and the demand spread. So, with the last £500 of her maternity pay she set up Vanroe.

“It’s like engineering in a glamorous field. Taking the compacts apart and getting them back together again can be a real challenge and that appeals to the engineer in me.”

Many of her customers are compact collectors, others are buying them as gifts.

Compacts start from around £30 and they come in all manner of shapes, sizes and designs and her business is growing as is her family, having given birth to Joseph.

“I specialise in floral compacts because they are currently very fashionable. Women love the nostalgia of the floral designs.

“I have such a wide range of customers, from 80-year-old ladies in America who can’t get them over there to women my age who are buying them as presents.”