Hunter's Invisible Face Powder trade card, featuring actress Lillie Langtry.
A fundamental and far-reaching change was taking place: the heightened importance of image making and performance in everyday life. Photographic and stage techniques of making up and posing introduced external and standardized models of beauty that challenged the “natural” ideal. For some advice writers, social life itself had become a performance that called for makeup, but only if used, paradoxically, to enact the part of one's true, natural self. Thus a woman whose pallor resulted from illness might legitimately apply rouge. So could a young girl if “its use originates in an innocent desire to please,” but the “old campaigner,” who reddened her cheeks to trick a man into marriage, remained a “painted Jezebel.” Although some women adhered to these rules, others vested self-portrayal with a degree of choice, play, and pleasure. The idea that a woman could remake her face—and that being natural was itself a pose—found its embodiment in Julian Eltinge, a female impersonator. In the early twentieth century Eltinge won acclaim playing fashionable and genteel debutantes onstage. So convincing was his portrayal that he issued a beauty magazine and sold his own cosmetics line, offering “a chance for every woman to be as beautiful as Julian Eltinge”!25
Women's growing interest in beauty products coincided with their new sense of identity as consumers. Women had long bought and bartered goods, but around 1900 a new, self-conscious notion of the woman consumer emerged. Women's magazines and advertisers inducted their female readers into a world of brand-name products and smart shopping, while department stores created a feminine paradise of abundance, pleasure, and service. Home economists and reformers, such as the National Consumers League, proposed a contrasting image—the rational consumer with a social conscience—but they, too, bolstered the view that consumption was integral to women's role.26
Many, however, were not yet ready to endorse the idea that women should buy their way to beauty. Cosmetics sales grew only incrementally between 1870 and 1900. Although they accelerated thereafter, as late as 1916, according to a trade estimate, only one in five Americans used toilet preparations of any sort, and per capita expenditures were a mere fifty cents. Many retailers remained nonplussed by beauty preparations. The mail-order Zion City General Store, whose “profits [were] used for God,” excluded cosmetics entirely; another catalog company sandwiched its Sur-Pur Face Powder for “ladies of culture and refinement” inconspicuously between livestock remedies, patent medicines, and harnesses. Some retailers issued advertising pamphlets that juxtaposed brand-name cosmetics with beautifying recipes, identifying women simultaneously with home production and market consumption.27
Women's magazines and the women's pages of city newspapers, appearing after the 1890s, also took an ambiguous position on the traffic in beauty aids and advice. Except for skin creams and lotions, cosmetics were not widely advertised in national magazines, unlike convenience foods and soaps. Editorial advice pushed homemade preparations and discouraged the use of makeup. Ladies’ Home Journal columnist Ruth Ashmore told “Anxious,” for instance, that face powder roughened the skin but was acceptable if used “to take away the disagreeable gloss.” She recommended girls improve their general health and use such homemade remedies as buttermilk or almond meal for the complexion. Such advice against the tide of commerce was, however, unable to stanch the flood of readers’ queries about beauty aids and makeup. The Baltimore Sun, for instance, ran over a dozen letters each Sunday from women who wanted to rid their face of freckles, fill out their cheeks, or darken the eyebrows. Some could not afford to buy the products they desired and asked for a comparable formula to mix at home; others wanted a recipe to take to the drugstore, to be compounded and purchased there.28
There were other signs of the growing importance of beautifying in the consumer-goods market. Druggists continued to compound their own cold creams and lotions, but such large wholesale drug suppliers as W. H. Schiefellin and McKesson & Robbins offered dozens of brand-name cosmetics, foreign and domestic. By the turn of the century, one wholesaler sold fifty different brands of cream, as many American-made powders and skin preparations, and eleven brands of cosmetique. Retail druggists began to see profit in promoting beauty aids to the healthy as well as filling prescriptions for the sick. They embraced modern methods of selling, highlighting packaging, free samples, island displays, and show windows.29
Druggists remained the primary distributors of beauty preparations, but other retail outlets boosted cosmetics sales. For the affluent consumer, department stores brought beauty secrets into a new urban setting of publicity and spectacle. At first merchants played down these commodities, jumbling a small array of powders, lily whites, and beautifiers with fancy goods and sundries. The most prescient, however, believing that toiletries put women in a spending mood, started to place cosmetics front and center on the main selling floor. A Macy's executive proudly told perfume manufacturers in 1909 that department stores intentionally “lured” women “to the counters by playing on their senses of smell.” At the lower end of the market, new chain drugstores and variety stores aggressively pushed bargain brands and private-label cosmetics. Rural and small-town customers could buy beauty products from door-to-door and mail-order firms. As early as 1897 Sears offered its own line of cosmetics, including rouge, eyebrow pencil, and face powder, along with such brands as Harriet Hubbard Ayer, Pozzoni, and Tetlow.30
A sample envelope for Tetlow's Gossamer,; a popular commercial face powder whose sales pitch emphasized innocent flirtation.
Cosmetics entrepreneurs also detected a budding demand among African Americans. Inventors began to patent hot irons and straightening tongs, while peddlers hawked hair growers, wigs, pressing oils, and complexion creams. One firm, based in the drugstore trade, had sold an ordinary ox-marrow pomade to white customers for years when “one day a young colored woman came in and purchased a dozen bottles.” This triggered a “great discovery,” “like finding a nugget of gold”:
We asked her: “What are you going to do with so much?” She replied, “It makes my hair long, soft and easy to comb, and I am getting it for my friends.” We then said, “Tell us all about it and we will give you a dozen extra bottles.” She then told of the merits of our pomade when applied to the hair of colored people.
The company began to canvass in black communities, started a word-of-mouth publicity campaign, and advertised extensively in black newspapers. Another established patent medicine company, Brooklyn-based E. Thomas Lyon, promoted the hair tonic Kaitheron to African Americans with a pamphlet called What Colored People Say and an Afro-American Almanac.31
Many firms selling to black women originated in such places as Richmond, Louisville, and Memphis, cities of the upper South with sizable black commercial districts, growing numbers of African-American migrants, and nascent chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing. In Richmond, for instance, Henry Schnurman developed Hartona in 1893, Thomas Beard Crane followed in 1898 with Wonderful Face Bleach, and Rilas Gathright manufactured a number of products under different names by 1900, including a “magnetic comb,” O-zo-no hair preparations and deodorant, and Imperial Whitener. All