Things you remember from your mum's handbag?

[TitaniasAss]

From when you were little?

I remember her purse, she always had the same leather purse since I could remember til when she died (when I was in early 40s)

Sweets in case anyone needed a wee treat

A tissue with lipstick on it where she'd blotted her lipstick

Half a million pens

Her lucky charm

SO many receipts

Loads of other random nonsense.

'Tunes' for her chronically bunged up nose

Always a tin of smints and money bags full of change (she worked in a pub). I used to love spending hours counting out 10 & 20ps.

When we cleared mum's stuff after she died, in every single one of the 24(I kid you not), handbags we found the same 5 items which she must have bought each time she got a new bag.

Purse...all with a small photo of my dad and her 3 girls. It was fascinating to see how much we had changed and we could place the bags in chronological order

Hairbrush...she was obsessed with having "tidy" hair...given that I resembled Crystal Tipps (Google it), as a child, Mum must have wept in her pillow every night.

Compact and mirror....quite the revelation as she hardly ever wore make up unless she was going "to a posh do", yet there was one in every bag.

Hair grips. Tidy hair and all that.

Tissues......the amount of tissues we found may well be the cause of massive deforestation.

I do miss her and her odd little ways.

My Nan always had a red leather purse, at least 2 lipsticks, a tub of foundation like make-up, a million letters and all her prescription medicine. Even when she lived with my auntie, because it was such a busy house she would either make us stay in her room with her bag or take it with her to the bathroom😂 I really miss that woman

What a lovely thread!

The smell of cigarette smoke mixed in with mint imperials, polo mints and sugared almonds. A purse. A bingo pen. Make -up mirrored compact powder. Lipstick. Comb.

The smell of tobacco when it opened.

A heavy smoker, she never left the house without cigarettes and matches.

My nan's handbag had a bottle of smelling salts in which id sniff if I felt brave 🤢🤣

Charlie perfume
Keys
Tissues
Driving licence (a paper one)
A wet flannel in a plastic bag. (We hated that)
A plastic container in 2 parts that held 2 tampons.

My mum rarely carried a handbag. She was more a 'grab a small purse and keys and go' type of gal!

My granny's handbag I remember exactly, though. She always carried the same black, leather bag that had a clasp opening. Inside were:

• 'Hankies' (a few scrunhed up, questionably looking tissues, also a few stuffed up her sleeve)

-Lipstick (Rimmel, some sort of shimmery coral colour) -Foldable plastic hair covering to protect her 'perm and set' from the rain -Chocolate (always kept an Animal Bar, Milky Way, Fudge finger or other cheap chocolate for her grandkids) -Polo mints -Usually a few salt/pepper/sugar sachets she'd pinched from a cafe -On Thursdays, her pension book (and if it was the holidays, that meant a trip to Wimpy) -10 B&H and a box of matches

This made me smile,
My mum carried her address book, diary, tissues, pens, another with bags of loose change for car parks etc small make up bag with lipstick, pressed powder and mascara box with brush, roll on 7/11 perfume and her purse,
Still carries most of this stuff with her, with the exception of make up and perfume, has a huge brick of a purse, which carries all sorts of things that she might need one day
It is so heavy, it also has to have numerous pockets in the bag, she knows where every thing is..

SmolCat - oh, that poem ….😢

Most of the things listed above , and :
A small penknife with a mother- of - pearl handle.
Cotton hanky , never tissues.
Extra strong mints , and/ or a packet of Polos.
A tiny dark blue bottle of Soir de Paris, with a silver coloured pointed stopper .

Boots cucumber wet wipes.

My mum also had smelling salts too!! Murray mints, safety pins and lots of tissues😁

My mum never carried makeup, she did hers perfectly before she left the house every day, and it never needed retouching. She never wore lipstick.

Her bag typically had tissues, a couple of boiled sweets or mints, Fishermen's Friends (god I hated them!), cigarette and lighter, glasses case and leather purse. Plus her perfume, always Youth Dew when I was growing up which she'd worn since her teens, then in the late 1980s she switched to Byzance. Her bag always smelled of her perfume.

A very very broken wallet, tobacco, some weed, and a wooden flip-knife that was also a bottle opener. And a hip flask.

Sometimes some hair bobbles too!

Oh these replies are bringing up so many memories for me!

I forgot about her Vanderbilt perfume. She always had that and I can't smell it now without becoming seriously choked up.

And the tape measure. She seemed to be one of those women that whenever someone needed something my mum would be able to produce it from her handbag. 😊

The older I get the more like her I get and that's fine with me.

A cotton handkerchief and a pot of Quickies wipes. They were small round wipes - like baby wipes but smaller in a blue pot. They smelled wonderful. She may have only had them when we were travelling (always by train) so the smell and the memory of holidays are all wrapped up in each other.

As a child I remember seeing these things come out of it: compact, lipstick, real hanky, cheque book, paying in book, pen, cigarette case, lighter, purse. Nowadays, I suspect compact, lipstick, real hanky, pen, purse.

I was never allowed to look in mother's handbag. A lady's handbag is sacrosanct.

Mums bag:

Purse
Hair brush
Polo mints new and half eaten
Hair clip
Keys

Now my son expects chocolate buttons in it.

Cigarettes and lighter.
Tissues.
Sweets of some sort (menthol and eucalyptus sweets, Murray Mints, Polo's, mint imperials, pear drops, pineapple chunks).
Her red leather purse.
A lipstick.
And everything seemed to have a few Green Sheild stamps stuck to it!

*shield

My mother died when I was a child and my older sister kept her last purse/bag (1980) and most of its contents so I actually know what was in it.

There was:
A lipstick in a brown/brick color
Certs peppermints
Wrigley's chewing gum
A hairbrush
A coin purse with US coins and a few Mexican ones because we went to Mexico once a week (we lived in a border city)
Her wallet with a photo of our family and her parents, her identification card, her social security card (UK equivalent is National Insurance card), a library card, a card with a prayer and image of Jesus, a bus pass and one credit card
A pocket-sized bible
A rosary
A lace headscarf when she would go to church
House keys

Pagan perfume (the little tiny size)

Elizabeth Arden Lipstick (in the gold case), small bottle of Blue Grass perfume, a rosary and a plastic rainhood (just in case).

Cotton hankies, lipstick, a sachet of 4711, safety pins, coins, hair grip.