Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830

As slim and elegant as a tube of lipstick, this volume traces the history of the French cosmetics trade from the thick fard of the mid-eighteenth century to the wan visages of the Romantic era. Fittingly for a book about truth in advertising, Martin has titled hers Selling Beauty. She is concerned with the marketing of cosmetics, not their history, use, and fabrication. (For that, readers should consult Catherine Lanoë’s comprehensive 2008 book La poudre et le fard: Une histoire des cosmétiques de la Renaissance aux Lumières, or Rosemarie Gerken’s more focused 2007 study La Toilette: die Inszenierung eines Raumes im 18. Jahrhundert in Frankreich). Within those parameters, she has succeeded in crafting a thoughtful and thought-provoking text that will resonate across disciplines.

Between 1750 and 1830, a bewildering variety of store-bought beauty concoctions replaced traditional home remedies. There was a corresponding increase in cosmetics advertisements, which Martin’s research combines with information gleaned from beauty manuals, medical treatises, patents, legal documents, trade cards, and inventories. Bankruptcy records proved particularly fruitful; even successful merchants struggled financially due to changing fashions and cutthroat competition. These at times dry archival records are enlivened by famous names: Casanova, the actress Mademoiselle Clairon, chemist Antoine Lavoisier (who, as patent inspector, tried to settle the tedious--as he considered it--question of whether or not rouge was medically safe), and Antoine Claude Maille, a vinegar and rouge merchant whose name survives in the modern-day mustard empire.

Cosmetics fell through the cracks in France’s strictly regulated guild system. This was both a boon and a hindrance; “in the traditional guild workshop, the corporation set standards for artisans to follow, encouraging perfection but not innovation” (64). Public fears of charlatanism—and merchants’ fears of counterfeiters—encouraged new marketing strategies, including touting guarantees of satisfaction and patents.   “Guarantees from a commerce renowned for its falsity were worth more than a multitude of royal titles” (66). Though patents were shockingly easy to obtain—and rarely offered real protection against counterfeiting—they lent unregulated products an appearance of legitimacy, innovation, and safety. 
Another, even more surprising strategy was the introduction of fixed prices, “meant to reassure the client” (66). These “fixed” sums actually varied a good deal, but it was according to the type of container purchased rather than the seller’s whims. Decorative containers—including rouge pots made of Sèvres porcelain—allowed cosmetics to be “both an expensive luxury and a fairly affordable high-quality necessity” (67). Continuing Cissie Fairchilds’ argument, Martin calls cosmetics the ideal “populuxe” product, as “they were easy to make and to transport,” and “their perishable nature meant constant demand” (3, 33). A thriving trade developed thanks to “the growing demand for affordable luxuries, the decline of guild monopolies, and the ease with which cosmetics could be manufactured” (33).

In this increasingly crowded market, merchants further differentiated their products by giving them distinctive names, often evoking the Orient. “Harem women, chosen by the sultan for his pleasure, represented true beauty” (134). But their allure was sanitized in cosmetics advertisements, stripped of any racial or sexual subtext. “Unlike the secretive and titillating descriptions of the harem in earlier literary works, the cosmetics advertised were commodities whose mystery had been completely revealed for the good of French women” (146). This was not entirely a commercial fabrication; many of the key ingredients in cosmetics were imported from the East.

Detractors attacked cosmetics as being not just unhelpful, but damaging to the skin—and morals. During the French Revolution, “honest self-presentation became essential to join the fraternity of citizens” (1). In order to survive commercially, sellers “repositioned what had been ostentatious elite products as purchases consistent with Enlightenment values” (2). However, as Martin points out, “criticizing artifice was a fairly easy task with few detractors. Replacing it with a new aesthetic of beauty was altogether more complicated” (75).

One group that made a credible effort was the medical profession. Doctors--“distancing themselves from the severe criticisms of philosophes, playwrights, and poets”--made medical arguments against cosmetics while also proposing healthy alternatives (108). Half of the beauty advice manuals published between 1750 and 1818 were written by doctors. “In the midst of public disapproval, this specialist knowledge gave women a means to reclaim beauty practices for themselves” (108). This “legacy of medical beauty” survives today in “pseudoscientific” brand names like Clinique and Laboratoire Garnier (116).

Though men gave up fard in the later eighteenth century, they continued to consume hair products. When hair powder and wigs went out of fashion around the time of the Revolution, other products rose up to take their place: dyes, potions to stop hair loss, and new, undetectable wigs. “That women might also need these was simply an additional benefit for the sellers” (156). Martin charts the rise of hair potions marketed to men, like Macassar oil, “an exotic solution to a prosaic problem” (167). Bear and beaver grease were similarly masculine remedies for a uniquely male predicament.

As it had with female cosmetics, “the medical profession . . . tried both to discredit and compete with this market” (170). For the first time, medicine paid serious attention to hair loss, forcing men “to enter into the commercial world of cosmetic practices in a period when most forms of male vanity were suspect” (155). The Napoleonic wars glorified young, fit men and launched a fashion for short hair and tight clothing, putting added focus on the ideal masculine physique--and added pressure on those who sought to achieve it without apparent effort.

If Selling Beauty ultimately reads more like a medical treatise on makeup than an alluring advertisement, it is partially due to the limitations of the source material; descriptions found in inventories are more quantative than qualitative, and visual sources cannot be trusted. As Martin points out, “there are inherent problems with using painting to reflect the use of cosmetics” (27). Nevertheless, one cannot help but wish for more images of painted beauties, expensive containers, and innovative hairpieces to supplement Martin’s vague and rather clinical descriptions of them. (It will come as no surprise to readers that the book was adapted from Martin’s dissertation.) Martin references exotic ingredients but gives no sense of why or in what quantities they were used, or how dangerous or counterproductive they really were (15). Of course, this information may be deemed incidental to the history of marketing, but one has to wonder if Martin has ever seen an eighteenth-century wig, or attempted to re-create any of the recipes she quotes, which might have supplied the sensual element that is conspicuously missing from the book.

When in doubt, Martin blames fickle fashion for trends that actually had multiple causes and lasted longer than the vagaries of fashion alone can explain. Much of the story of cosmetics in eighteenth-century France hinges on the persistent taste for white hair and skin, which Martin does not satisfactorily explain. With such a long and diverse period to cover, generalizations are inevitable, and it is sometimes unclear whether Martin is discussing the pre- or post-revolutionary period, or both. But she also demonstrates the efficacy of a beauty-based approach; in particular, she convincingly challenges longstanding assumptions about Nicolas René Jollain’s painting La toilette, which was altered to reflect post-Revolutionary concepts of femininity (96).

There is a good argument for not tarting up a subject that is already prone to sensationalism. Nevertheless, Selling Beauty could use a coat of lipstick.