The reciprocal relation of the inner and outer body became a staple of the burgeoning trade in drugs and elixirs. Warning against exclusive reliance on external treatments, one vendor advised ingesting arsenic wafers to improve a poor complexion, in addition to moderate diet, frequent bathing, and exercise. Nerve tonics and blood purifiers promised to cure “disfiguring humors, humiliating eruptions, itching and burning tortures, loathsome sores,” and every other skin affliction by correcting internal imbalances. The Potter Drug Company hedged its bets, urging consumers both to swallow its Cuticura patent remedy and to apply it to the skin to relieve skin disorders.16
By the mid-nineteenth century, the expansion of the market began to transform women's knowledge of beauty preparations. A growing commerce in herbs, oils, and chemicals enabled women to secure formerly exotic and costly substances. Women continued to mix simple complexion recipes—horseradish and sour milk, lemon juice and sugar—but many now sought ingredients available only at pharmacies or general stores. A recipe for Turkish rouge, for instance, instructed women to “get three cents worth of alkanet chips at any druggist's.” Although people living in the country's interior often could not afford or even acquire unusual ingredients, drug wholesalers and distributors used new transportation networks to extend their availability greatly. Domestic and imported drugs, spices, dyes, and essences, as well as commercially made beauty preparations, filled their catalogues. These businesses increasingly referred to visible powders and paints as cosmetics, to make them more acceptable by blurring the distinction between skin-masking and skin-improving products. Although paint continued to be a term of moral censure, cosmetics gradually became the general name for all beauty preparations.17
Women who did not make their own cosmetics had two choices. They could go to a pharmacist (or, less often, a hairdresser) who compounded preparations under a “house” label, or they could purchase commercial products made by perfumers and “patent cosmetic” firms. The distinction was not a trivial one, for it pitched local druggists using standard formulas against remote manufacturers of secret skin remedies and beauty aids.
Druggists’ invoice records and daybooks suggest the small but perceptible place of cosmetics in nineteenth-century trade. Urban and small-town druggists alike kept collections of cosmetics recipes, drawing upon published formularies and testing their own inventions. Edward Townsend, a Philadelphia druggist, wrote down recipes for skin problems from many sources and frequently logged their effectiveness. One cold cream would “keep sweet during warm weather,” a freckle lotion was “said to be a good article,” he noted in his formulary. Townsend, like most druggists, compounded generic versions of cosmetics women knew by name, from old standbys like Gowland's Lotion to such newer brand-name goods as Miner's Cold Cream and Hunter's Invisible Face Powder.18 George Putney and Bryan Hough, small-town pharmacists in New York and New Jersey, also had on hand ingredients to compound their own cosmetics. A few commercial preparations, including cologne, hair oil, shaving cream, pomades, and skin whitener, appeared on their shelves in the 1860s. Stock from wholesalers increased gradually in the decades that followed. In the 1880s, for instance, Putney offered a cold cream from the big wholesale drug supplier McKesson & Robbins in addition to the cream he put up himself.19
As Putney's and Hough's businesses suggest, it took commercial preparations a long time to establish themselves. There was no identifiable “cosmetics industry” in the nineteenth century, no large and distinct sector of the economy devoted to beauty products. In 1849, the value of manufactured toiletries throughout the United States totalled only $355,000. Although sales grew through the 1800s, they remained small in scale compared to the widespread popularity of such consumer goods as patent medicines and soaps. Still, the trade catalogues, advertisements, broadsides, and advice books of the period reveal a growing interest in these products.20
A variety of manufacturers made commercial preparations. Apparently, the most desirable came from abroad. Commercial agents imported precious cosmetics and paints to sell in fashionable American shops; these included English lotions, French perfumes, Portuguese rouge dishes, and “Chinese Boxes of Color,” containing color-saturated papers of rouge, pearl powder, and eyebrow blacking. Some American drug wholesalers and retailers also began to branch into cosmetics manufacturing, and a small number of businesses whose primary products were hair goods, perfume, or even house paint made cosmetics a sideline. The Philadelphia firm T. W. Dyott, for example, began in 1814 as an importer and wholesaler of drugs, chemicals, and dye stuffs, and soon produced a line of cosmetics, including cold cream, skin lotion, hair powder, and pomatum. The firm touted its Balm of Iberia, which swiftly “improves the skin to perfection; rendering it smooth, white, odoriferous and healthy.” Dyott maintained a large warehouse, advertised in newspapers and broadsheets, and sold through agents, mainly concentrated along the Eastern seaboard but extending as far west as the Missouri Territory. The company was among the first merchandisers to develop a national market, but cosmetics were a fraction of its trade.21
Perfumers too played an important part in the early beauty business. Requiring specialized knowledge of essences and distillation, perfumery was considered a skilled craft distinct from the drug trade. According to several perfumers, American demand for fragrant creams and lotions was “general” and came from all social classes: “The pomade of the fashionable belle becomes…the bear's grease of the kitchen maid.” In addition to importing cosmetics from Paris and London, American manufacturers, often emigrants from France, began to make cheap and popular imitations. By mid-century, the Philadelphia firms of Jules Hauel, Roussel, and Bazin not only dominated perfume manufacturing, but produced full lines of beauty products.22
The most controversial beauty aids on the market were made by patent cosmetics companies. Historically monarchs in early modern Europe had granted patent rights to encourage innovation and industry. In the nineteenth century, however, the term “patent” simply referred to medicines and beauty preparations sold through specific techniques of national advertising and distribution. By disseminating trade cards, almanacs, and handbills, patent cosmetic manufacturers often bypassed traditional distributors and retailers to address consumers directly. They competed fiercely with one another, using psychological appeals and before-and-after pictures, touting secret formulas and miraculous transformations. Dr. Gouraud's cosmetics and Jones's preparations, for example, sparred in the pages of the New York Daily Tribune, with such rhymes as this:
Do you hear that lady talk?
See her face destroyed by chalk;
Once't was white, but now, ‘tis yellow,
Coarse and rough, and dark and sallow.
The themes of elite fashion and social contest often characterized the sales pitch for patent cosmetics. Thus Laird's Bloom of Youth, with its deadly ingredients, advertised itself through tableaux of high society—ladies at dinner, gossiping about a rival's face and form; a languid beauty gazing into her mirror; a fashionable woman the center of attention at a ball.23
City dwellers could purchase commercial cosmetics in a variety of outlets. In the mid-nineteenth century, hairdressers and specialty stores sold combs, perfumes, and toilet articles in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Carroll and Hutchinson, a New York fancy goods dealer whose motto was “we deal in the beautiful,” invited ladies “to call during their promenade in Broadway,” examine the shop's artwork, and browse the jewelry, stationery, and cosmetics for sale.24