Peddlers and traders even carried the cheaper brands into distant farming and frontier communities. Although the “patent-nostrum men have their head-quarters in the cities,” warned one writer, “it is the shelves of country stores that they load with their quack stuff.” Self-help manuals often advised would-be entrepreneurs to peddle cosmetics; these wares could “command a quick sale and insure a full pocket.”26
Although the commerce in beauty aids remained limited, critical voices grew ever louder. While sellers claimed their wares rapidly improved and beautified the complexion, many advice writers and physicians argued otherwise, noting that the dramatic brilliance imparted to the skin was short-lived. At best, these goods covered up flaws, acting locally on the face rather than healing skin problems. Constant use, doctors warned, damaged the epidermis and internal organs and led to death.
The secrecy surrounding patent cosmetics, especially those “advertised with high-sounding names,” heightened the alarm. Americans distrusted cosmetics sold in the market, and with reason: Mercury, lead, and arsenic appeared in the formulas of a number of fashionable beauty preparations. Moreover, the exorbitant price of these toiletries, “sold at twelve to fifteen times above the actual cost,” contributed to the impression of hucksterism. It seems manufacturers had already learned a cardinal principle of selling cosmetics: that consumers measured the value of “beauty secrets” not by how cheap they were but how dear. Buyers also rightly worried that distant manufacturers evaded responsibility for their products’ defects. Actress Lola Montez expressed the opinion of many: Women should become their “own manufacturer—not only as a matter of economy, but of safety.”27
These objections to patent cosmetics echoed the common view that costly chemical compounds and mineral paints were dangerous, unlike traditional homemade preparations. Patent compounds were also associated with social climbers and urban sophisticates concerned more with making a good appearance than with living a virtuous life. For many observers, the commodity form of cosmetics quite literally represented the corrosive effects of the market economy—the false colors of sellers, the superficial brilliance of advertisers, the masking of true value. Abolitionist and journalist Lydia Maria Child singled out Gouraud's and Jones's shrill handbills as troubling signs of a new “commercial age” in American life. She satirized patent cosmetics advertising—the exclusive beauty secret that everybody could purchase—but also observed how skillfully pitchmen appealed to human vanity.28 Warning against imitations, adulteration, deceitful advertising, and unfair pricing, advice writers began to address women not only as household manufacturers but also as consumers who were increasingly negotiating the world of commerce.
The outcry over commercial beauty preparations focused especially on the morality of masking or transforming features and raised anew longstanding questions about women's nature and social role. Powder and paint had always been more identified with the feminine than the masculine in Anglo-American culture, but in the eighteenth century, their use was as much a matter of class and rank as gender. In England, enamel, rouge, white powder, masks, and beauty patches were instruments of fashion that covered pockmarks, drew attention to good features, and served as props in the spectacle of court society and posh urban life. Elite colonists of both sexes imitated the aristocratic mode and sought the grooming aids of apothecaries and hairdressers. Powder and paint proclaimed nobility and social prestige, as essential to fashionable high culture as ornamental clothing and tea drinking.29
A challenge to this view came during the American Revolution. In a republican society, manly citizens and virtuous women were expected to reject costly beauty preparations and other signs of aristocratic style. The transformation in self-presentation was most pronounced in men, who spurned luxurious fabrics, perfume, and adornments as effete and unmanly. In a personal declaration of independence, Benjamin Franklin discarded his periwig. The “great masculine renunciation,” as fashion historians call it, replaced spectacular male display, once considered an essential symbol of monarchial rule, with a subdued and understated appearance. Republican ideals of manly citizenship reinforced the idea: Men need not display their authority, since their virtue was inherent. The democratization of American politics after 1830 further advanced the new view of male self-presentation. The point of no return may have occurred in 1840, when Representative Charles Ogle, in a speech before Congress, attacked Martin Van Buren's presidency and his manhood by ridiculing the toiletries on Van Buren's dressing table. Corinthian Oil of Cream and Concentrated Persian Essence no longer endorsed the gentleman of rank but intimated the emasculated dandy.30
As a mercantile and manufacturing class gained power, businessmen avoided artificiality in appearance in an effort to gain trust in the marketplace. In turn, men who adorned their features were treated with contempt. Novelist Sara Willis, for instance, disdained a “be-curled, be-perfumed popinjay”; Walt Whitman said of a “painted” man on Broadway, with “bright red cheeks and singularly jetty black eyebrows,” that he “looks like a doll.” Of course men continued to pay attention to the mirror. Shaving paraphernalia, hair dyes and “rejuvenators,” bay rum and brilliantine were all sold on the market throughout the nineteenth century. Barber supply catalogues featured face washes, colognes, tinted talcum powders, and “cosmetique,” a perfumed waxy substance used to touch up gray hair. Except for shaving and hair care, however, cosmetic practices among men became largely covert and unacknowledged.31
Women also were encouraged to shun paints and artifice in the service of new notions of female virtue and natural beauty. Early nineteenth-century literature bound the feminine to ideals of sexual chastity and transcendent purity. These views took root under the growing authority of the middle class, which perceived beautifying as the “natural disposition of woman,” but only as it reflected those feminine ideals.32
A belief in physiognomic principles, that outer appearance corresponded to inner character, underlay these views and echoed the earlier belief in humoralism. Reinvigorated by Johann Kaspar Lavater in the 1780s, physiognomy and its nineteenth-century cousin phrenology claimed to reveal personality through the study of facial and bodily features. These pseudosciences classified men in terms of a diverse range of occupations and aptitudes. When it came to women, however, their subject was solely beauty and virtue. Thus physical beauty originated not in visual sensation and formal aesthetics, but in its “representative and correspondent” relationship to goodness.33
Assessments of female beauty, however, often unconsciously reversed the physiognomic equation, submerging individuals to types and reducing moral attributes to physical ones. Hair, skin, and eye color frequently stood as signs of women's inner virtue. The facial ideal was fair and white skin, blushing cheeks, ruby lips, expressive eyes, and a “bloom” of youth—the lily and the rose. Although some commentators disagreed, most condemned excessive pallor or coarse ruddiness. Nor was the ideal an opaque white surface, but a luminous complexion that disclosed thought and feeling.
If beauty registered women's goodness, then achieving beauty posed a moral dilemma. Sisters Judith and Hannah Murray neatly captured the middle-class viewpoint in their 1827 gift book, The Toilet, made by hand and sold for charity. Each page carried a riddle in verse and an image of a cosmetic jar, mirror, or other item typically found in a lady's boudoir. The pictures were pasted onto the page in such a way that when lifted, they revealed the answer to the puzzle. “Apply this precious liquid to the face / And every feature beams with youth and grace.” A pot of “universal beautifier”? No, the secret lay in “good humour.” In like manner, the only “genuine rouge” was modesty, the “best white paint” innocence. These riddles must have had a wide appeal. Harper's Bazaar described an “old-fashioned” fair in 1872, where a girl sold for a dime little packages “said to contain the purest of cosmetics”—the Murrays’ moral recipes.34
The Murray sisters acknowledged the allure of