For most American women, these cosmetic fads and fashions meant little. But the aesthetic of natural beauty imposed its own demands, paradoxically compelling women to use white powder and even apply “washes” and masking paints to achieve the desired look. Indeed, skin whiteners remained the most popular cosmetic throughout the nineteenth century. Women ranked white powder—typically ground starch, rice, or chalk—most acceptable on sanitary and practical grounds. Especially in the West and South, women used powder to protect the skin from the climate, prevent tanning, and reduce perspiration and shine. Even so, powdering went beyond hygiene. Concealing ruddiness, sweat, and exertion, it produced the proper pale shade of leisured gentility. “The ladies have strange ways of adding to their charms,” Englishwoman Frances Trollope wrote during her antebellum travels in America. “They powder themselves immoderately, face, neck, and arms, with pulverised starch; the effect is indescribably disagreeable by day-light, and not very favourable at any time.” Certainly many women viewed powdering as an unhealthy evil, a practice that blocked the pores but stimulated vanity. As late as 1900 in many Midwestern towns, only daring young women poured “some of the coarse grained powder into paper envelopes” and secretly applied it at dances. Still, beauty adviser Marie Mott Gage noted, powdering was akin to “charity balls, church fairs, corsets, décolleté gowns and other follies,” often criticized but “so dear to the popular heart.”8
Other skin lighteners, closer in definition to paints, also supported the aesthetic ideal. Known generically as lily white, white wash, and “white cosmetic,” these products were used by some women irrespective of class and age. In 1879, Jessie Benton Frémont admired the “fresh clean faces of the girls & women” in New York and Boston, in contrast to the women who “powder & daub” in San Francisco and Prescott, Arizona. In the West, she wrote, “it is quite funny to see that smeared smooth white face, & red wrists emerging from one button pale gloves. But the creme de lis [a whitening paste] is sure to be on.” Even a widow in her sixties might be a customer: Ariadne Bennard purchased three or four bottles of lily white annually from an apothecary in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.9
Women applying dangerous lead-based whitening lotions like Bloom of Youth began to appear in medical case records after the Civil War. These women were often wage earners who had begun the practice as teenagers or young adults. Going to great lengths to conceal their cosmetics use, they initially were diagnosed with hysteria or reproductive disorders, the usual suspects in Victorian women's ailments. Only after repeated questioning, their condition worsening, would they admit the truth. Some may have fallen for patent cosmetic advertising, with its appealing images of fashion and high society, but most offered explanations grounded in the exigencies of their daily life. An umbrella maker stated a simple desire “to take the shine off the skin.” Some used white paint specifically to improve their chances at work: A ballet dancer applied a lead-based wash supplied by her dance company; a milliner painted to look refined when she met her patrons; a young Irish-born copyist used different powders and pastes, applying them to her neck and shoulders when going to work. The white face, purged of the exertions of labor, simultaneously asserted bourgeois refinement and racial privilege.10
The use of powders and skin whiteners among African Americans received notice by the black press as early as the 1850s. The Anglo-American Magazine criticized African Americans who appeared with painted faces, lips “puckered up and drawn in,” the hair “sleeked over and pressed under, or cut off so short that it can't curl.” It decried the emulation of white beauty standards: “Beautiful black and brown faces by the application of rouge and lily white are made to assume unnatural tints, like the vivid hue of painted corpses.” How common such practices had become, and among which groups of African Americans, is unknown. It may be that some black devotees of white powder were not so much emulating as parodying the style of white elites—making up the face and hair to complement the exuberant, “high-style” dress that black dandies and their lady friends wore.11
Crane and Co. advertisement addressed to African Americans, in The Colored American Magazine, 1903.
Still, the aesthetic dimension of racism—gradations of skin color, textures of hair—shaped work opportunities, marriage chances, and social life, giving advantages to those with lighter complexions and straighter locks. Early dealers in face bleach certainly exploited this prejudice in the 1880s and 1890s: One pledged that a “black skin remover” would yield a “peach-like complexion”; another vowed to “gradually turn the skin of a black person five or six shades lighter”; a third claimed that “the Negro need not complain any longer of black skin.” In reality, those products often caused blotches on the skin and sometimes permanent injury.12
Advertising appeals to African Americans offer a telling contrast to the promotional pamphlets and trade cards distributed at large. Addressed implicitly to white women, the latter promoted preparations to cover up blemishes, bleach freckles, and whiten the skin, all the while proclaiming their products’ naturalness. Advertisements do not necessarily or directly mirror popular attitudes, but in this case, they seem to have touched upon a common cultural practice. Women might purchase a skin whitener that covered and colored the skin and simultaneously disclaim its status as paint. For women of European descent, whitening could be absorbed within acceptable skin-care routines and assimilated into the ruling beauty ideal, the natural face of white genteel womanhood—although, as Jessie Benton Frémont testified, one glance at the hands could undo this careful effort to naturalize artifice. For African Americans, the fiction was impossible: Whitening cosmetics, touted as cures for “disabling” African features, reinforced a racialized aesthetic through a makeover that appeared anything but natural.
Hagaus Magnolia Balm trade card, late nineteenth century? addressed to white consumers.
The idealization of the “natural” face occurred, ironically, within a middle class beginning to define itself through consumption. Other places in which private and public intertwined—the clothed body, the well-furnished parlor—were accepted, indeed celebrated, as sites of commodity culture. The face, however, was deemed outside fashion, a sign of true identity, even as it served a highly contrived self-presentation, in which artifice shaped the body to a fashionable silhouette and clothing was often exuberantly ornamental.13
It was women like Ellen Strong and the Bloom of Youth consumers who upended the conventional meaning of paint as an unnatural mask. They saw the face not as a transparent window into inner beauty, but as an image of their own making, an integral part of their own daily performances. Their perspective came to seem more credible and accurate in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when several long-term developments—new urban sites of consumption and display, a flourishing fashion economy, the spread of image-making technologies, and a nascent culture of celebrity—changed how Americans perceived the face.
Seeing and being seen took on greater cultural importance in the late-nineteenth-century city. Middle-class women enjoyed a new round of social activities: They strolled the streets, went shopping, attended matinees, and ate out. For those with little money to spend, “just looking” was a pleasant diversion. As historian William Leach shows, a new class of merchants prodded consumers to picture themselves in a world of consumer goods and stylish looks. While browsing wares for sale, women saw well-dressed manikins, gazed at themselves in plate glass windows and mirrors, and took note of each other's appearanees.14
Beyond the city too, fashion sense flourished. Dressmakers, milliners, and seamstresses catered to an accelerating demand for stylish clothing. Women's magazines, fashion dolls, and paper patterns spread Parisian fashions to middle-class women throughout the United States. Working-class women sewed their own