Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations that Have Made Us Beautiful - Softcover

CHAPTER 1
Eyes
Made-up eyes are by no means desirable, and to many are singularly displeasing. The same, however, may be said of made-up faces generally. Nevertheless it is extensively practiced.

-Mrs. Sarah Jane Pierce, Homely Girls, 1890
As regards cosmetics, the only sin against society seems to be make-up badly applied, The "Would you brush your teeth in public?" attitude towards make-up died some time ago.

-Alice-Leone Moats, Nice Girls, 1933
When it comes to flirtation, the eyes can cast a potent spell. An intense gaze is one of the most effective ways a woman can broadcast her interest in a man. (Believe it or not, scientists have actually quantified this.)(1) But how is it that eye makeup, particularly mascara, became a standard implement in America's cosmetic toolbox?

Mascara became legitimate in the United States only fairly recently in the historic scheme of things. Many a proper Victorian lady, who had no qualms about inflating her breasts with rubber bust enhancers or upholstering her rear end with a bustle, was vociferously opposed to altering her face with any type of cosmetic. Indeed, the late 1800s brought furious catfights over the legitimacy of rouge pots and eyebrow pencils. Were they the province of sophisticated beauties or the downfall of wanton souls?

Charlotte Smith, editor of The Woman Inventor, argued against the use of cosmetics while the entrepreneur Madame M. Yale vigorously supported women's right to use them. Both women testified on the subject of cosmetics before the House of Representative’s Agricultural Committee in 1892. Madame Yale--"young and lovely, with masses of blonde hair"--was a successful businesswoman who had built a company worth $500,000 selling cosmetics, soaps, corsets, and a facial steaming machine.(2)

Described by the Pittsburgh Leader as a "priestess of the cosmetic art,"(3) Madame Yale lectured on cosmetics at the Chicago Opera House on March 17, 1892, arguing that they should be included among exhibits featuring female inventors. Yale complained volubly about the formidable Bertha Palmer, who, as the head of the board of Lady Managers at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, decided what did and did not belong in the Woman's Building of that fair.

The logic of Madame Yale's pro-cosmetics argument to feminists was inspired: "Training and skills being equal, the woman who looks better will get the job, so why not make the most of your appearance?"(4) Mrs. Palmer was unswayed. She decreed that such nonsense was not worthy of the Woman's Building.

Harriet Hubbard Ayer also took up the pro-cosmetics mantle in a lengthy screed in her 1899 beauty book.

"I am always a bit amused when anathemas are hurled at the present use of cosmetics, particularly when a hopelessly-soured and pitilessly-unattractive female or a blatant, tobacco-smoking, spirituously-odorous male addresses me on the subject," she fairly sputtered.(5)

Cosmetics were a neutral force, Ayer argued. "As a matter of actual fact, whatever one's opinion may be as to the moral of the question, cosmetics have been used both by good and bad women as far back as we can learn anything of the personal customs of the sex, just as wine has been drunk by priests and sots, by gentlemen and cads, and will be used and abused so long as men and wine exist."(6)

Women under the age of thirty who used cosmetics, as Ayer saw it, were painting the lily and gilding gold. But as a woman aged, she warned, "there are times in a woman's life, when, if she be wise, she will attempt to repair the damage of years and care."

"When a wife sees a haggard-looking ghost of herself reflected from her mirror, when perhaps she is painfully conscious that the eyes she loves best are turning from her faded beauty to a less worthy object, then I think she is not only justified in delicately simulating, by every aid known to cosmetic art, the charms she has lost, but she is stupid not to do so. It is the plain, unadorned, weary and too natural woman whose husband invariably falls a victim to the wiles of a Delilah, or succumbs to the artificial charms of a Jezebel. The very man who will almost fall in a fit at the sight of toilet powder in his wife's dressing room, will break her heart and waste his substance in the worship of a peroxide or regenerator Titian-red blonde.

"Let a premium be placed on sallow-faced, pale-lipped, dull, thin-haired women in the devotion and loyalty of the other sex, and the trade of the cosmetic artist will soon become a matter of ancient history."(7)
A Mirror with a Memory
As photography steadily became more popular, from 1870 to 1900, so too did cosmetics. An amateur photographer of the time referred to photographs as "permanent mirrors,"(8) while Oliver Wendell Holmes, upon viewing Mathew Brady's photographs of Civil War battlefields, called the camera a "mirror with a memory."(9)

Increasingly, sitters insisted that their images be improved upon for the special occasion of a portrait. Enameling--lacquering the face with white paint--therefore came into vogue. "American women who ordinarily shunned paint requested it at photographers' studios," according to historian Kathy Peiss.(10)

H. J. Rodgers, in his 1872 manual of photography, advised women not just on what clothing was most flattering in a portrait but also provided them with many pages of cosmetic recipes. Clearly, women took advantage of such concoctions, as the photographs themselves attest. In a series of portraits from the 1880s, for example, Baby Doe Tabor, who married a silver magnate in the Colorado town of Leadville, displays eyebrows unapologetically darkened by artificial means. Stage actress Charlotte "Lottie" Mignon Crabtree unabashedly wore kohl on her eyes (and rouge on her lips) in the carte de visites she passed out liberally to her fans.

Photographer Henry Peach Robinson lamented the vanity of his clients. "All kinds of powders and cosmetics were brought into play," he said, "until sitters did not think they were being properly treated if their faces and hair were not powdered until they looked like a ghastly mockery of the clown in a pantomime."(11)

Those who did not have the foresight to spackle their faces beforehand often insisted that their portraits be enhanced after the fact by hand-tinting or other sleight of hand.

Around 1870 one New York cosmetics boutique sold thirteen different kinds of powder and twenty types of rouge. Fashionable women carried a Lady's Pocket Companion, or Portable Complection, which discretely held rouge, powder, an eyebrow pencil, and a bottle of india ink. Altman's department store featured a "making-up" department.(12)

In the 1880s cosmetics were beginning to receive celebrity endorsements from the likes of Lillie Langtry, the voluptuous British stage actress who epitomized beauty during that era. By the 1890s ordinary women, not just those who made their living on the stage, were increasingly interested in painting their faces. During that decade the Baltimore Sun published more than a dozen letters each week from women seeking answers to beauty questions ranging from how to lighten freckles to how to darken eyebrows.

Certain enhancements were considered legitimate. Pale lashes on natural blonds, for example, were viewed almost as a birth defect. "White lashes and brows are so disagreeably suggestive that one cannot help but pardon their unfortunate possessor for wanting to disguise them by a harmless device," writes Sarah Jane Pierce in Homely Girls. "A decoction of walnut hulls should be made in the right season and bottled. Applied to the brows and lashes with a fine hair pencil will turn them to a rich brown, which will harmonize well with fair hair."(13)

Max Beerbohm, then an undergraduate at Oxford, chimed in with his support, albeit facetiously, for the pro-cosmetics brigade. In April 1894 he wrote an article entitled "A Defense of Cosmetics":

"No longer is a lady of fashion blamed if, to escape the outrageous persecution of time, she fly for sanctuary to the toilet-table; and if a damosel, prying in her mirror, be sure that with brush and pigment she can trick herself into more charm, we are not angry. Indeed, why should we ever have been? Surely it is laudable, this wish to make fair the ugly and overtop fairness, and no wonder that within the last five years the trade of the makers of cosmetics has increased immoderately--twenty-fold, so one of these makers has said to me."

Many a husband, suddenly realizing that his wife was painted, alleged Beerbohm in his spoof, "bade her sternly, 'Go up and take it all off,' and, on her reappearance, bade her with increasing sternness, 'Go up and put it all on again.' "
The Eyes Have It
While cosmetics had long been made at home or specially ordered from the apothecary and applied on the sly, by the 1910s the tide began to turn in favor of public acceptance of cosmetics.

In Europe, Diaghilev's London ballet production of Shéhérazade in 1909 sent sales of mascara and eye shadow rocketing upward. The Russian dancers' dramatic eye makeup stepped up the demand for kohl--at least for the privileged classes--and also started the fad of colored and gilded eye shadows that color-coordinated with daring evening dresses designed by the likes of Paul Poiret, an eccentric French dressmaker who, according to beauty entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein in her autobiography, used to receive his guests with "live panthers chained in the entrance hall, each one attended by a six-foot Negro stripped to the waist, a bejeweled turban wound around his head, and his bare torso oiled and gl...