The Pink Jungle
(See Cover) Cultivation comes first, the proper care of the body --From the well-tended vine comes the most exquisite wine.
-- Ovid, The Art of Love With a clink of vials and a wafting of odors, the mysterious rite begins. It is 6:45 a.m., and her husband is still abed, but pretty Mrs. James Locke sits before a mirrored table in her three-room San Francisco apartment, her blonde hair covered by a filmy nylon cap. Over an array of multiscented bottles, sticks, jars and tubes, Jean Locke hovers like an alchemist. She cleans her skin of night cream, anoints it with icy water -- and for one brief moment shows her true face. Then, slowly, comes the metamorphosis.
Over her face she spreads a foundation cream, creating a pale and expressionless mask. She caresses her cheeks with a liquid rouge, slowly adding color to her face, tops it off by gently patting on a flesh-colored powder. She shadows her eyes with turquoise, dabs a few drops of perfume behind her ears, at her elbows, temples and wrists. With a dark pencil she shapes her eyebrows to give an artful lift to her expression, brushes her lashes with a penlike wand to emphasize her blue eyes. Finally, 20 minutes later, she spreads on the finishing touch -- an orange lipstick to match her fingernail polish. As Mrs.
Locke's husband views the masterpiece she will wear to her job as secretary in an advertising office, he says: "Some day you ought to sign it, like Renoir or Picasso." Honeyed Promises. In millions of homes across the U.S. last week, millions of women celebrated similar rites in great er or lesser degree, intent on enhancing nature's boon or correcting its defects.
Never before in history has the pursuit of beauty, health and youth been so single-minded as it is in the U.S. today. Science has added more years to people's lives; U.S. women are determined to add more life to their years.
Spurring on the pursuit is the U.S.
beauty industry, which has grown into a giant by preaching with burning evange lism a message every woman wants to hear: "You, too, can be beautiful." "There are no ugly women," say the ads for Manhattan's Diedre line, "only lazy ones." Says Steve Mayham of the Toilet Goods Association: "This is an industry of ideas and imagination, and what we are selling is hope." The industry encourages hope by sur rounding itself with the most enticing come-ons since Eve described the apple.
It glamorizes its products with names sug gestive of romance, adventure, passion: such foundation powders as Pond's Angel Face, Revlon's Love-Pat and Max Fac tor's Creme Puff; such lipsticks as Rubinstein's Red Hellion, Revlon's Fire and Ice, Helen Neushaefer's Torrid and Pink Pas sion; such creams as Max Factor's Cup of Youth and Helena Rubinstein's Tree of Life. It lends mystic significance to a word such as moisturizing and nurtures a euphemistic cant in which reducing becomes slenderizing, dye becomes hair color, and diet becomes menu plan. Its slogans have entered the language: "She's lovely, she's engaged, she uses Pond's"; "The Skin You Love to Touch"; "Which Twin Has the Toni?"
With its irresistible combination of spur and promise, the U.S. beauty industry has made U.S. women the world's best groomed. "It is well known around the world," says British-born Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, "that American women are the most beautiful--and that they can make themselves even better than they are. The beauty industry is, socially, highly important and desirable. There is certainly a magic transformation performed on women who enter appearing like Mrs. Malaprop and leave as beautifully embellished as Madame Recamier reclining on her chaise longue."
No Recession. The beauty industry fears no recession, for a woman will give up food before her pursuit of beauty--and often because of it. The U.S. spent an estimated $4 billion on beauty aids and services in 1957. Sales of toilet preparations--heart of the beauty business--amounted to $1.4 billion in 1957, up 8.3% from the year before and almost double ten years ago. In 1958 the industry expects to have the best year in its history.
Beauty aids, once considered a luxury, are now a necessity--especially to the 20 million women who have jobs. Young girls now battle parents to wear cosmetics in grammar school, and women's magazines are full of frightening stories about older women who let themselves go--and wake up to find their husbands gone. "A woman who doesn't wear lipstick," says Max Factor, president of one of the top five U.S. cosmetics firms, "feels undressed in public. Unless she works on a farm." The result: 95% of all women over the age of twelve now use at least one of the products manufactured by the U.S. beauty industry.
Fickle Woman. The fickleness of woman is a fearsome fact that can make or break a firm. But the beauty business has turned it to advantage by bringing out new products in the twinkling of an eye. The home permanents (led by Toni) threatened to empty the beauty shops. The short, or poodle, haircut filled them up--and home-permanent sales slumped 29% last year. Hair coloring, hardly respectable a few years ago, has grown into a $35 million do-it-yourself business and a $200 million beauty parlor market; three women in ten now tint, rinse or bleach their hair.
The emphasis on speed and convenience has attracted millions of new customers. The oldtime mudpacks have been replaced by Pond's 37-second face cream; Mrs. Potter's walnut-juice stain, a turn-of-the-century hair dye, has given way to Roux's five-minute hair rinse. The squeeze bottle and the aerosol container have revolutionized the use of old products, led to new ones, e.g., hair spray, which has grown to an $84 million business in only seven years.
To supply the old as well as the new, some 2,600 companies are directly engaged in the manufacture of cosmetics. Milwaukee's Kolmar Laboratories, the world's largest private-label manufacturer of cosmetics, produces 1.800 shades of lipstick, uses 20.000 different cosmetic formulas for the 385 U.S. firms it serves. There are 110,000 beauty salons, more than twice the number of drugstores. And more than 5 million Americans patronize some 750 reducing salons and thousands of health and massage clubs.
Fluids & Secrets. The industry is a sharply competitive world of calculated eccentricities in which only the books are always well balanced. It is a pink jungle of feuds and jealously guarded secrets in which people and ideas are pirated. The oldest feuders are two of the best-known names in cosmetics: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden (real name: Florence Nightingale Graham).
Helena Rubinstein started in Melbourne, Australia, in 1902 with a batch of homemade face cream from her native Poland, made $1,000,000 before she was 25, and invaded the U.S. in 1915, billing herself "The World's Greatest Beauty Culturist." She is now worth at least $100 million, collects paintings in her 26-room Park Avenue triplex, and has 14 portraits of herself by artists ranging from Dufy to Dali.
Elizabeth Arden studied to be a nurse, entered the cosmetics business because, she says, she wanted to make women beautiful as well as healthy. Before opening her own beauty salon in 1910, she spent an apprenticeship as secretary in a Fifth Avenue beauty shop. Today she grosses an estimated $15 million yearly, owns a topflight racing stable (Maine Chance). The carefully preserved beauty queens are the best ads for their own products: Rubinstein is in her 80s, Arden in her 70s--and their exact ages are as jealously guarded as their cosmetic secrets. Says an aide: "We never talk to Miss Arden about the passage of time."
Some 74,000 women a year are soothed, massaged and coifed in Madame Rubinstein's Manhattan salon, headquarters of her three-continent chain. A woman who wants to spend an entire day at the salon can spend up to $120 for a series of treatments that would make a siren out of a Westchester matron. First, she is told to change into a black leotard, given paper slippers and a white robe to wear. Her medical history is solemnly taken ("Any operations? How many children?"). After doing exercises in front of a mirror under direction of a Ph.D. from Vienna ($12), she hops into a 3O-minute bubble bath with froth 3 ft. high ($5). Her skin is then defuzzed of superfluous hair by a wax treatment ($26). She can have an infrared treatment ("Detoxicates--very effective after a good drinking night") at $10 or a paraffin application at $15 to lose a pound or two. Then comes a facial, in which her face is coated with cream ("Voilaa, I begin"), massaged ("Facial care begins at the collarbone") and sprayed with a salty liquid for "disturbed skin" ($9). To top it off she goes to a treatment by Michel, who "sketches" the hairdo he thinks best for her, gives her a permanent, then fluffs, smooths and fusses her hair into place ($35). The final touch: she can have artificial fingernails applied for $17.50.
Elizabeth Arden has all this--and then some. She operates two remote Shangri-Las, also called Maine Chance, one in Maine and one near Phoenix, Ariz. (made more famous by Mamie Eisenhower's two-week stay last spring). At the Maine Chances, described by Elizabeth as "magic isles where cares and worries vanish," patrons not only get treatments for their face, figure and hair, but live an austere life that rules out fatty foods and liquor (if they are overweight), involves daily exercise and sports instruction. Cost: from $400 to $600 weekly, depending on accommodations.
Careful Guards. Both Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein abhor the other's ideas ("I don't go in for all that trash," says Miss Arden of one of her rival's favorite ingredients), but show a fondness for each other's personnel. Arden's raids on Rubinstein reached a climax in 1938, when she hired away Rubinstein's sales manager at a fancy salary. But Rubinstein struck back a year later by hiring as her vice president none other than Elizabeth Arden's ex-husband, Thomas J. Lewis, who had been general manager of Arden's wholesale empire. Presumably Elizabeth Arden's secrets went with him.
"I think this is the nastiest business in the world," says Elizabeth Arden.
"There are so many people in it, and they all just copy me." She is probably right--but there is nothing unusual about it. Each company carefully guards its new gimmicks and products, and a chemist from one firm having lunch with a chemist from another is sure to be suspect. But once a product is out, everyone grabs greedily for it. Bristol-Myers worked for nearly six years to research its Ban roll-on deodorant; after it appeared, it was copied by nearly a dozen firms.
Since it takes a hefty pot of gold to meet such competition, big companies are taking over what used to be an industry of small firms. The industry's biggest is Avon (1957 sales: a record $100,379,695), which sells its products door to door with the help of some 100,000 representatives. But the liveliest is fast-growing Revlon, run by aggressive Charles Revson, 51. Revson founded his company in 1932, built it up to a $95 million gross last year by advertising the elegance and glamorous names of his products, popularizing such ideas as matching lipstick and fingernail polish and a variety of shades. The undisputed sales genius of the industry, he colors it like a blob of his own fire-red nail polish, is as well known for chewing up admen and underlings as spitting out new ideas (TIME, Sept. 30). "I don't meet competition," he snaps. "I crush it." Says Elizabeth Arden: "I just don't like that man."
Artistic Disorder. While industry leaders set the fashions in products, fashions in women's grooming are set by a different, more remote breed. U.S. women wait anxiously on the decrees of such men as Antoine, aging (seventyish), wavy-haired dean of U.S. hair stylists, who has turned more heads than a nation of Casanovas. From his headquarters in Paris, Antoine lays down the law for the 48 Antoine salons that are part of Seligman & Latz, the nation's largest beauty chain (292 salons). He is responsible for the page boy, the pompadour, the Italian cut, the tousle and the bubble bob, has just decreed for fall a "tousled-up Madame Reacamier" style (forehead fringe, slightly curled bouffant sides, and a high-rising back). Antoine's advice: "Try to achieve a look of artistic disorder."
To achieve artistic disorder--or the well-groomed look of order--the beauty-conscious woman spends half an hour daily making up at home, has a cabinet full of the latest beauty aids. Says a Montclair, N.J. insurance executive whose wife wears Wings on her forehead at night to smooth out wrinkles: "I kiss her good night, and I think I'm in bed with American Airlines." Playwright-Author Jean (Please Don't Eat the Daisies) Kerr wears so much cold cream at night that she says: "I go to bed like I'm going to swim the channel. My husband doesn't like it, but what's he going to do?"
Why do women chase the elusive dream of beauty with such frightening energy? The obvious answer--that they want to appear more attractive to men--is only part of the truth. Women insist that it is the psychological lift that makes cosmetics important in their lives. Says Mrs. Ruth Kay, a Cleveland housewife: "If I feel down, I take extra pains with makeup. When a woman feels she looks her best, she radiates a pleasant attitude and gives the entire family a lift. Without makeup she is self-conscious and won't put her best foot forward."
The Oldest Search. The search for youth and beauty is as old as woman herself. Thirteen centuries before Christ, when ancient Egypt's Queen Nefertete was the ideal of beauty, Egyptians placed cones of scented unguents on their heads to melt and thus perfume their faces. The Greeks used makeup and perfume, prized a fine appearance so highly that Athenian magistrates fined sloppy women. In Imperial Rome, women blackened their eyelids, whitened their skins with chalk or white lead, used animal fat and eggs of ants to treat their skin. Ovid scolded his mistress: "Did I not tell you to leave off dyeing your hair? Now you have no hair left to dye."
By the 18th century, cosmetics and perfumes had become so popular that the English Parliament passed a law declaring that any woman who "shall impose upon, seduce and betray into matrimony any of His Majesty's subjects by virtue of scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, or bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty against witchcraft, and the marriage . . . shall be null and void."
U.S. women in the nation's early days used powdered chalk and fresh-cut beet juice for beauty, but the onset of the Victorian age made "paint and powder" the hallmark of the dance-hall girl or the woman of the street. The Gibson girl, created by Artist Charles Dana Gibson, was the modest and aloof dream girl of U.S. males in the early years of the century. It was not until World War I that makeup crawled back to respectability, and not until the Roaring Twenties that it dared to flaunt its painted face--under a permanent wave, invented in Switzerland by Charles Nessler. This wonderful electric gadget brought hope that every head could be curly--though many a hair curled at the early cost: $200. (In 1938 San Francisco's Willat company introduced the cold wave, which gradually made the machine permanent obsolete.)
Though the Depression cut into the beauty business, it eventually proved a boon by getting more women out to work, making them more conscious of their appearance. In World War II Washington politicians foolishly talked of abolishing the beauty industry for the duration to save materials. But wiser heads prevailed. (When Hitler banned makeup, the women of Germany simply refused to work.) The industry put its lipsticks in cardboard containers, found substitutes for strategic materials. One substitute: a cream type of hair tonic that is outselling the older oil type today. By war's end, sales of cosmetics had increased 53%.
Beauty in the Supermarkets. Postwar, Revlon's Charlie Revson sparked a significant change for the beauty industry when he bought The $64,000 Question. Revlon's sales jumped 54% in the program's first year, and others hustled to take to the air. To recoup the high cost of TV advertising quickly, firms had to tout specific products instead of whole lines, moved more and more products out of drug and department stores and into the mass-selling supermarkets. Today, more than one-fifth of the toilet preparations are sold in food stores. The industry sees no reason why it cannot use similar techniques to tap the new mass market of men's cosmetics (deodorants, hair tonics, etc.). So far, men have been reluctant to shop for their own toiletries, but the industry hopes to spur them to buy more avidly.
The industry confesses to a bigger failure. It can find no way to get U.S. women to buy more perfume. Partly because of its advertising, the industry has given many women the idea that perfume 1) is a precious commodity to be used sparingly, and 2) may provoke a passionate male onslaught before the evening has even begun. On their own, many U.S. women seem to think that perfume is out of step with the clean, sporty American look. Though makers sold $110 million worth of fragrance products last year (top three perfumes: Arpege, Chanel No. 5, My-Sin), the perfume market has barely expanded in the last ten years. "Perfume is a woman's secret weapon," says Jean Desprees, executive vice president of Coty,
Inc. "But we don't know how to tell her." Proof of Desprees's statement is the fact that Coty, once the perfume industry's leader, lost $1,071,608 last year.
Lilies & Placenta. But the beauty industry is far more interested in finding new products than rescuing old ones, is moving more and more into research. Revlon has more than 70 chemists on its staff, and about half its current sales are from products introduced since 1950, e.g., high-gloss lipstick. Top Brass hair dressing for men and hair sprays. Charlie Revson, who proclaims that "research is a deep religion with me," likes to don a white coat and take a turn at the retorts. On the average, a product takes from a year and a half to two years from conception to store shelves. Bringing out a simple item like a new lipstick costs from $200,000 to $400,000 for such necessities as experimenting to get the exact color, market testing, replacing old advertising and color cards.
Since few firms have unique products, they often try to outdo each other in boastful bragging about what they do have. Helena Rubinstein, who styles herself the "First Lady of Beauty Science," claims that her Tree of Life cream contains extract of human placenta "from nature's storehouse of nutrients for the unborn baby." To supply juice of water lilies for some of her other products, she keeps convents of nuns in London and Paris busy growing lilies. A year ago Lilly Dachee introduced a finishing powder "which actually contains pulverized pearls," claimed that it made the skin glow, the eyes sparkle.
Few items have given rise to such extravagant claims as royal jelly, the creamy substance produced by nurse bees to nourish the long-lived queen bee in the hive. When it came out, women swarmed around the beauty counters, attracted by ads that called royal jelly "the secret of eternal youth." More than a dozen cosmetic houses rushed to put it in high-priced creams, soaps, even lipsticks. (France's house of Orlane, reasoning that the bees got their jelly from flowers, went one better and put on the U.S. market a cream "created from the precious pollen of the orchid.")
But those who bought royal jelly had a right to feel stung. Reported the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau newsletter: "There is little evidence to support any significant therapeutic, cosmetic or nutritional value in the product for humans." Says Maison G. DeNavarre, chief chemist of Michigan's Beauty Counselors, Inc.: "Royal Queen jelly is not even for the birds. It is for the bees. It is a fad and does nothing for the skin."
To control the industry's enthusiasm for extravagant claims and keep a watch out for harmful ingredients, both the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration occasionally have to step in. FTC allows harmless puffs--"ours is best"--draws the line at "youth-reviving creams" and at any inference that cells can be reborn by potions. Not only are claims sometimes false, but products downright harmful. The FDA recently ordered Ten-Day Press-On Nail Polish off the market in several states after 700 women complained that it made their nails split and break.
6$ Lipstick. The saga of royal jelly is a striking example of one of the most significant aspects of the whole beauty business--one that puzzles many a woman, irritates many a husband. Says Mel Finkelstein, president of the House of Westmore: "In this business, price is not consistent with cost." When it first came out, royal jelly cream sold for $15 an ounce despite the fact that an ounce contained only about 150 milligrams of jelly, worth about 17-c- today a woman can still buy creams containing royal jelly in some stores for $15 an ounce, but she can also buy them elsewhere for $1. Similarly, the cost of making the average lipstick is only 4-c--6-c-, and the difference in manufacturing costs between a lipstick bought on Fifth Avenue or at Woolworth's is only about 1-c- or 2-c-.
Most of the difference between the cost and the wholesale price goes into packaging and advertising--which often cost more than the product itself. For the top companies, profits are fat; Revlon made a 9.4% profit on its gross after taxes, more than leaders in many another industry. Said a Denver manufacturer, who admits to a 900% markup on certain products: "A cheap line wouldn't do well. Women wouldn't be caught dead telling their friends they bought cheap cosmetics."
Turtle & Shark Oil. High prices and exotic ingredients are unfailing lures. Tomatoes and Italian parsley are used in some creams. Ella Bache puts out a cream that is 80% seaweed. Estee Lauder boasts in newspaper ads that its Re-Nutriv, which contains turtle and shark oil, royal jelly, silicone, Leichol and 20 other in gredients, is "the most expensive facial preparation in the world." Cost: $115 for 16 ounces.
Yet, some industry leaders themselves admit that there is little any cosmetic can actually do to help the top layer of the skin, almost twice the thickness of onionskin paper. Says one beautician: "The best cosmetic is soap and water."
Inner Beauty. To their credit, more and more women are realizing that beauty is more than skin deep. They want healthy, well-formed bodies and new personalities to go with their made-up faces. Thus the growth of the cosmetics industry is being matched by the growth of reducing salons, gyms and their fellow travelers, the charm schools.
A front runner in the race to slim the shapeless is Slenderella, with 187 salons across the nation. Founded in 1950 by a hustling Missourian, Larry Mack, it has succeeded in making reducing seem glamorous and effortless with slick promotion and plush salons, last year put 300,000 customers through their paces. In a private-treatment booth, the hopeful Slenderella customer takes off her shoes and girdle, and lies down upon a flat leather couch. She gets a free supply of mint-flavored vitamin wafers. While dreamy music murmurs in the background, the couch begins to massage her gently, taking up each bulging part as she moves her shoulders and hips over the table's vibrating platform. Suddenly she takes off! The machine changes pace, shakes her vigorously for several minutes in a horseback-like rhythm known in the trade as "the Seabiscuit." She dismounts a happier woman. Slenderella claims that 40 minutes on the table, at $2, is the equivalent of a ten-mile horseback ride. The Stauffer System, a top Slenderella rival that claims to serve nearly a million patrons a year in its 250 salons, says that a similar treatment on its couches equals nine holes of golf.
"It's very slick," says a West Coast housewife who has made the rounds of the reducing salons. "They measure you at once. They make you feel like a horse --and you usually are." Even if you are not, some salons know well how to show a customer just how much she has lost. When she enrolls, measurements are taken with the tape loose; when she finishes a course, measurements are taken with the tape tight.
For both men and women, countless gyms have also sprung up offering more active exercise. The biggest, American Health Studios Inc. (278 studios), has attracted 4,500,000 Americans, is expanding at the rate of 15 studios a month. Its Silhouette salons guarantee women (now 60% of its total business) the loss of 15 Ibs. in two months if they are overweight, the addition of two inches to the bust if they are undersized.
The slenderizing craze has gone far beyond the salon walls. The makers of Relax-A-cizor, a small black vibrating case bristling with pink dials, belts and other gadgets, claim to have placed their product in 200,000 homes since 1949, at $200 a throw. "It feels," said one man who tried it, "like a slight case of electrocution." A handful of firms also turn out vibrating furniture that promises to help blood circulation, relax tired muscles, and keep weight down. Says Bert Goodrich of American Health Studios: "If this fantastic trend toward healthier and better physique continues, we're going to turn into a race of supermen."
Treat & Beautify. Whatever form the race for beauty and health takes, its tempo is sure to speed up. As medical science enables more people to live longer --and feel younger--they will also want to look younger. Enormous demand will have to be met for special cosmetics for the aged, the allergic and the young with bad skin, safe and odorless depilatories and permanents, a hair spray that will give a natural curl out of an aerosol can.
Already the biggest trend in beauty is toward more scientific cosmetics to meet such needs. For years, says Beauty Counselors' De Navarre, "the industry was lying like hell" about its products. With scientific advances, says Kolmar Chairman Lessing L. Kole, "the adman's rather fanciful copy will have to be proved." But most women will not really care. Since they are buying hope, disappointment does not endure. There is always another counter--and a new wonder cream. Says redoubtable Author Kerr: "I know perfectly well that these creams I buy for $8 cost 32-c- to make. But I must have them. I know that they're not really made from whale sperm or the tips of elderly roses. But I'm the type who buys everything. You can't just sit back and wither. You've got to take steps."
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