Featured How Old for this Plastic Santa Pin

Any thoughts on age of this Santa Pin? 2.25" long

 

@cxgirl

 

Wild guess, circa 1950?

 

Over here, that sort of safety pin back is usually thirties.

 

It looks as if someone has put eye shadow and lipstick on him.

 

I'm so tempted...

 

I would vote for 30-40's also... doesn't seem 50's to me. Although, Fat Santa first arrived on the scene in the the 1800's... he wasn't widely depicted as portly until the 1930 with the first "Coke" ads.
Merry Merry, Leslie

 

The original does look like he and Mrs Claus got into the spiked eggnog!

 

Drunk Lucille Ball dressing up as Santa for a TV skit.

 

You daft lot!

 

I thought the same thing! Something I might have done as a child All my Barbies had pierced ears...courtesy of straight pins with the little balls on the end

Should I try to clean this at all...what areas, and with what? Probably wouldn't touch the red. It's already coming off a tiny bit.

 

Yet pretty darn close! Thanks.

 

I resemble that remark. As I've said a million times: I've never been normal a day in my life and am too [blinkin'] old to start now!

 

libby, are you certain it's plastic? The backside view looks more like resin or some sort of ceramic. The pin looks mediaeval, but if Santa is plastic, that makes it overwhelmingly likely it's a post-war piece.

 

I wondered if someone was trying to make a transgender santa but realised it would be so wrong and if I laughed the PC brigade would be after me.

 

I think it's plastic, hard plastic. It doesn't bend at all. Does weight tell you anything? 4.4 grams ~ why post war if plastic?

 

No PC brigade here...laugh away

 

libby, plastic, in the many forms and formulations we know it so commonly today, wasn't really a thing, certainly not for trinkets and toys, before the late 1940s. Modern plastics were developed largely as part of the chemical engineering conducted during the war, and didn't appear commercially until the war's end. Prior to that, ceramics, celluoloid, resins, bakelite...

 

That's not the case for jewellery. Plasrtic was used pre WW2.

And of course, bakelite is plastic as is celluloid. The difference is that celluloid is based on natural organic substances, whilst bakelite is wholly synthetic. Fair few years since I studied all that, but I can still spout some of the formulae.