There’s an old joke that goes like this: Why do women use makeup and perfume? Because they’re ugly and they smell bad. What the joke tells us about gender and beauty and self-worth in our culture may depend on how one feels about femininity and its relationship to feminism. You could read it as a critique of women’s own self-criticism, an affirmation that we don’t need makeup to be beautiful and our natural scents are just fine; or you could hear instead a crushing, brutal misogyny.
Mirroring changes for women
A cultural history takes wide-angle look at a pair of pioneers in cosmetics industry
In “Ugly Beauty,’’ a dual biography of two cosmetic industry titans, British cultural historian Ruth Brandon argues that makeup is good for women. She writes that “the public acceptance of women’s cosmetics has varied according to the social status of their sex,’’ arguing that, in general, societies where women’s public and professional opportunities approach those of men are places where makeup is accepted, even demanded, while cultures in which women are kept at home also deny them the liberating appeal of a smoky eye and red lip. I’m not certain this is true — don’t many veiled women conceal a full face full of makeup? — but whether makeup today is a symbol of liberation or of oppressive beauty standards, Brandon’s main point is unassailable: Its growth as an industry has mirrored the expansion of women’s rights and freedoms.
In a business that sells the possibility of self-invention, Helena Rubinstein was an appropriate pioneer. Born Chaja Rubinstein in 1870s Krakow, Poland, she fled to Australia in her early 20s to avoid an arranged marriage. It was there that she renamed herself and began working in the industry she would dominate for the next 60 years. Rubinstein’s extreme work ethic (18-hour days were routine) and intuitive brilliance for advertising and marketing (she invented the notions of classifying skin as dry, oily, or normal and of using different creams for morning and night) launched a business that made her the world’s first female millionaire. In time she left Australia for Paris, then London, eventually landing in New York in 1914, just as the American century was really getting going.
Among Rubinstein’s master strokes in the early years of her New York-based empire was the idea of selling her products not only at her trademark boutiques, and never in mass-market drugstores, but expanding into department stores, a practice that other makeup brands followed.
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