Ugly Beauty by Ruth Brandon Read Free Book Online Page A

$3.50—customers got suspicious. When he raised the price to
$5, business picked up. (See Greenberg’s Beg,
Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life .)
    [ 5 ] This
figure is arrived at using the retail price index—what the equivalent
money would buy. But this is only one of several ways of calculating
comparative monetary worth. Using, for example, average earnings, the
figure would be more like $61.3 million. See
http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php#.
    [ 6 ] A male
writer, trying out skin creams in 2010 for the purposes of an article,
confirmed this potent effect. “After a few weeks of my trial
. . . a habit has formed, and I find myself using the creams
and potions without question. I still don’t believe my skin looks
different . . . but . . . it’s not really about skin
at all, it’s about self-perception. Using skincare products every day
starts to become worthwhile largely because I know they are expensive;
like most of us I have been conditioned to associate well-being with
expenditure, and I feel—against my better judgment—as if I am
experiencing luxury.” (Michael Hann, “Spot the Difference,” Guardian , January 25, 2010.)
    [ 7 ] A
cocktail called the Monkey Gland still reminds us of this bizarre
(though in its day highly popular) fad. The ingredients are:
    1 ounce
gin
    1
ounce orange juice
    1 dash
grenadine
    1 dash
anise (probably originally absinthe; Pernod or Benedictine are often
substituted now)
    [ 8 ] This
effect was seen in New York after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and again
during the winter of 2008–9, a time of deep recession, when lipstick
sales rose as much as 20 percent, year-on-year. (“Red Alert: Lipstick
Wars Are Coming,” Observer , January 17,
2010.)

Chapter
Two
    The
Authoritarian
    I
    When people say at a dinner-party, “You’re so
lucky to be in cosmetics!” I say, “Yes, but you had to realize that in
1907.”
    —L ILIANE B ETTENCOURT -S CHUELLER , 1987
    R ue
Saint-Honoré, where Helena Rubinstein opened her first Paris salon in 1908, is
one of Paris’s most glamorous thoroughfares. But the backstreets that surround
it are dark and dingy. Among the least prepossessing is a little corridor,
called rue d’Alger, that links rue Saint-Honoré with rue de Rivoli. It was here,
however, while Madame bustled about installing her stock and arranging couches
and curtains in her new boutique, that the true revolution in cosmetics was
taking shape. At the back of number 4’s dim courtyard a young chemist named
Eugène Schueller had rented a two-room mezzanine to serve as a combination of
laboratory, bedroom, and kitchen. He was working to isolate the world’s first
safe artificial hair dye, and by the time Rubinstein opened her salon, he was
almost there. For more than two years he had worked night and day, watching his
savings diminish, cooking his food on the Bunsen burner he used for his chemical
experiments. Finally he established his formula. He gave it the provisional name
L’Auréole, after a hairstyle popular in 1905, the year he had begun his
researches. Soon he would change this name to L’Oréal. Eighty years later, his
company would swallow Madame’s.
    Like Helena Rubinstein, Eugène Schueller entered
the beauty business at the optimum moment, when the market was ready but still
untapped. Like her, it would make him rich. Like her, he spoke to the universal
fear of aging, to every woman’s dread of wrinkles and grey hairs. But in every
other respect, they, like their products, were utterly different.
    If you believed Helena Rubinstein’s advertising,
her various creams and lotions were miracle balms that banished blemishes and
left the user’s skin blissfully free of wrinkles. And since that was what her
customers ached to believe, they convinced themselves that it was true—or, at
the very least, that the creams prevented deterioration. There was never any
proof, however, that this was actually so. By the 1930s a large number of firms
were