Ugly Beauty by Ruth Brandon Read Free Book Online Page B

marketing beauty products of various kinds, and in 1934 the pressure group
Consumer Research organized a survey of them, the first attempt at any
systematic analysis of what beauty creams did. It showed that most beauty
products did not live up to their claims, while some were even dangerous. None
of the creams marketed by Helena Rubinstein or her competitors had, Consumer
Research reported, any measurable effect on wrinkles, while the notion that skin
needed three or four different types of cream—cold cream, cleansing cream,
vanishing cream, and skin food—was a myth invented to increase sales. Worse, the
glycerine frequently used in vanishing cream was a common allergen that often
caused rashes.
    Beauticians like Rubinstein and her peers thus trod
a wobbly psychological tightrope. On the one hand they shared their customers’
profound desire to believe the propaganda. On the other, they knew—none
better!—that what went into their products was really nothing but the same old
less-than-magical stuff women had always used, repackaged and skillfully sold.
The Consumer Research survey therefore filled them with dread. On the day its
results were published, in a book called Skin Deep ,
the cosmetics industry threw a party for magazine editors at the Pierre Hotel in
Manhattan. The captive audience was harangued for an hour and a half on the
wickedness of reformers and consumers’ research organizations and the
irresponsible anticosmetic prejudice of the American Medical Association. It was
magazines’ duty, the speaker perorated, to help preserve a million-dollar
industry, now irresponsibly imperiled. Meanwhile the worst offenders hastened to
change their more offensive products—Max Factor removing barium sulphate colors,
which caused rashes, from its lipstick lines, Pond’s discontinuing the use of
rice starch, which clogged the pores, in its face powder. But there was little
they could do to make products such as face creams perform the wonders promised
in the advertising copy—and they knew it.
    As it happened, they need not have worried. The
public bought the book, which swiftly rose up the bestseller charts—and went on
with their usual cosmetic routines. No exposé, however painstaking, could
outweigh the magical allure of hope. A reader from California spoke for many. Skin Deep had “quite shattered my illusions as
to the efficacy of cosmetics,” she wrote. But despite being “a college graduate
and a schoolteacher, I don’t really so much believe what saleswomen tell me as I
hope that what they tell me will come true.” 1 This blind and unquenchable desire—a desire that she herself shared—was the
foundation of Madame’s fortune.
    L’Oréal was a different matter entirely. Like
Helena Rubinstein, Eugène Schueller owed his success to both luck and talent.
But his talent was for science, and his luck to have been presented with an
opening that, left to himself, he would never have espied. In the beauty
industry, whose claims routinely bore little if any relation to reality, his
product was unique in that both he and his customers knew it would always do
precisely what the package promised. L’Oréal worked: it would dye your hair any
color you wished—and safely. And this was possible because of perhaps the
greatest of all the differences between Eugène Schueller and Helena Rubinstein:
he was educated, where she was not. The foundation of her business was folk
wisdom; Schueller’s business rested on science. What was applicable to hair dye
was applicable elsewhere, too. He could make other products, in other
industries, and realize their possibilities as he
had realized L’Oréal’s. It was simply a matter of time.
    II
    E ugène
Schueller, born in 1881, was nine years younger than Helena Rubinstein. He, too,
came from a poor background. His grandfather was a shoemaker, his father a
pastry cook, his mother a baker’s assistant. The Schueller family originated in
Alsace, the much-disputed