Hope in a Jar. Kathy Peiss
in artificial aids,” and the matron whose color fades with work and time and who legitimately “finds it necessary to rouge.” “When painting reveals the application it is disgusting,” wrote another entrant, but mimicking nature, enhancing the features, or even recalling a beauty that once existed was acceptable art. One writer went so far as to observe that rouging was an admission of ugliness, and thus enacted honesty, not deception!42
A few turned away from the older moral aesthetic to reappraise the meaning of paint altogether. “We can't all be born beautiful,” observed one woman, and cosmetic aids equalized opportunity in a world where beauty might affect women's fortunes. This had long been true of the marriage market, but now, as they entered the workplace in greater numbers, “women who start out to battle with the world alone will be more successful and demand more respect if they are attractive and well dressed.” Thus some women started to uncouple paint and immorality, but could not fully detach themselves from the notion that paint covered up a true self. “As beauty is only skin deep anyhow,” wrote one, “cannot paint and powder, false hair and pads hide a true heart and chaste soul?”43
Changes in cosmetic products and applications reflected and reinforced the growing use of beauty aids by respectable women, and hastened the transformation of paint into makeup. Lily whites, enamels, and vinegar rouge—the traditional white and red colorings in liquid or cream form—continued to be available but were in decline by 1900. As a movement for safer food and drugs arose in the Progressive era, popular outcry over lead, mercury, and other deadly ingredients in cosmetics grew louder, and many of the older “washes” and paints containing them began to disappear from the market.44
New face powders and application techniques competed with the older paints and began to supplant them. So-called “invisible” powder had been advertised since the 1860s by such manufacturers as Solon Palmer and Pozzoni. Pure white and bright red-pink remained the most widely available colors, but more natural-looking powders and dry rouges, developed by French perfumers and imitated by American manufacturers, slowly gained a foothold. Cosmetics firms promoted such new tints as “brunette” and “flesh” (cream and light beige shades), intended to harmonize with the complexion. Anthony Overton introduced High-Brown face powder to African Americans around 1900, spurring other companies to sell darker powder shades in the African-American market. Makeup techniques also evolved. Liquid whitener and rouge, usually applied with a sponge, were often quite visible and bright, giving the skin a masklike veneer. In the early twentieth century, such firms as Pond's and Pompeian publicized “vanishing cream” as a transparent base for face powder, which allowed skin tones and facial expression to surface.45
Beyond powder and rouge, women often improvised their makeup with preparations sold for other purposes. Cosmetique and mascaro, as it was called, were all-purpose dyes in pomade or cake form, which men applied to graying mustaches and hair along the temples, and women used to tint eyebrows and lashes. Paste rouge was applied to the lips as well as cheeks. Some women apparently adapted theatrical makeup for everyday use—not greasepaints, but lighter-weight, tinted powders, which they toned down and blended for the street, restaurants, or evening parties. When Max Factor opened a professional makeup studio for stage and screen actors in Los Angeles in 1909, ordinary women came in to purchase theatrical eye shadow and eyebrow pencil for their home use; Factor began to package these as everyday cosmetics. As women began to buy theatrical preparations, tinted powders, and dry rouge, the notion of paint as unnatural and makeup as mask increasingly gave way to the modern sense of makeup as an expression of self and personality.46
A scene of the new urban beauty culture. John Sloan, Hairdresser's Window, 1907.
To paint or not to paint? Women pondered the question, with its charged implications for appropriate female behavior and appearance, as the commerce in beauty goods, information, and services swelled. Although some women remained embarrassed consumers or continued to use homemade products, for others, painting the face, once the symbol of the most disreputable form of commerce, was now simply one option among many. In the crescendo of talk and circulation of goods, a public commercial realm devoted to female beautifying had begun to take shape. In the nation's cities, journalist Anne O'Hagan commented, women in their pursuit of beauty could turn to “the Turkish baths, the manicure establishments—almost as thick upon the city street as the saloons; the massage places, the electro therapeutics, the ‘don't worry’ clubs…; the dermatological institutes; the half of every drug store.” It was a confusing world. More and more cosmetics were available on the market, but their production and marketing remained haphazard, a jumbling of goods that invited skepticism, if not outright censure. Patent cosmetics makers, perfumers, and druggists contended over the efficacy of their products; beauty doctors and complexion specialists competed for clients; columnists in magazines and newspapers offered conflicting advice. Still, as O'Hagan observed, slowly “something of a system is being evolved from the hodgepodge.”47 That system, created to a large extent by women themselves, was known as “beauty culture.”
Beauty Culture
and Women's
Commerce
Cosmetics today seem quintessential products of a consumer culture dominated by large corporations, national advertising, and widely circulated images of ideal beauty. The origins of American beauty culture lie elsewhere, however, in a spider's web of businesses—beauty parlors, druggists, department stores, patent cosmetic companies, perfumers, mail-order houses, and women's magazines that thrived at the turn of the century and formed the nascent infrastructure of the beauty industry. Few of these enterprises used the kinds of systematic marketing and sales campaigns so familiar to contemporary Americans. Nonetheless, the proliferation of products, services, and information about cosmetics and beauty definitively recast nineteenth-century attitudes toward female appearance.
Women played a key role in these developments. Indeed, the beauty industry may be the only business, at least until recent decades, in which American women achieved the highest levels of success, wealth, and authority. Such well-known figures as Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, the remarkable African-American entrepreneurs Madam C. J. Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone, and post-World War II businesswomen Estee Lauder and Mary Kay Ash mark an ongoing tradition of female leadership. Although exceptional businesswomen, they are only the most visible signs of a much larger phenomenon. As beauty parlor owners, cosmetics entrepreneurs, and “complexion specialists,” women charted a path to mass consumption outside the emergent system of national advertising and distribution. In so doing, they diminished Americans’ suspicion of cosmetics by promoting beauty care as a set of practices at once physical, individual, social, and commercial. Their businesses transformed the personal cultivation of beauty—the original meaning of the expression “beauty culture”—into a culture of shared meanings and rituals.
Before the Civil War, women dressed their own hair or, if affluent, bade their maids or slaves to do so. Professional hairdressers, often men who visited the homes of the wealthy, were relatively few in number. Commercial beautifying was generally considered a “vulgarizing calling,” a legacy of its ties to personal service and hands-on bodily care. This view changed as women's need for jobs grew more pressing in the late nineteenth century. Industry, immigration, and urban growth had transformed the American economy and society. Working-class women expected to support themselves or contribute to family income, but even middle-class women were thrown back on their own resources when their husbands died or failed in business. The vast majority of female wage earners toiled in factories, on farms, or in private homes as domestic workers, but growing numbers worked in clerical, retail, and