"Naturally you don’t want to put anything in your mouth that is going to hurt you.
"The first thing we asked ‘Does this stuff hurt you?’" Mae Cubberley, who instructed Grace in the technique, later remembered. Every time the girls raised the brushes to their mouths, they swallowed a little of the glowing green paint. The girls were instructed to slip their paintbrushes between their lips to make a fine point - a practice called lip-pointing, or a "lip, dip, paint routine," as playwright Melanie Marnich later described it. Grace and her colleagues obediently followed the technique they’d been taught for the painstaking handiwork of painting the tiny dials, some of which were only 3.5 centimeters wide. They made the most of the perk, wearing their good dresses to the plant so they’d shine in the dance halls at night, and even painting radium onto their teeth for a smile that would knock their suitors dead. Radium’s luminosity was part of its allure, and the dial painters soon became known as the "ghost girls" - because by the time they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark. Many of them were teenagers, with small hands perfect for the artistic work, and they spread the message of their new job’s appeal through their friend and family networks often, whole sets of siblings worked alongside each other in the studio. Dial painting was "the elite job for the poor working girls" it paid more than three times the average factory job, and those lucky enough to land a position ranked in the top 5% of female workers nationally, giving the women financial freedom in a time of burgeoning female empowerment.
With war declared, hundreds of working-class women flocked to the studio where they were employed to paint watches and military dials with the new element radium, which had been discovered by Marie Curie a little less than 20 years before.
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