Sweet Smell of Success

It is the standard American bedtime cartoon: the wife whose cold-cream-slathered face makes a death mask look comparatively pert, and the husband who can't get the light out fast enough to miss the sight. These days the man in the picture would do well to take a second look -- not to mention a healthy sniff. Chances are that the lady is no longer mulched in mineral oil and petroleum jelly but gently steeped in camomile tea and elder-flower lotion. The bedroom air, once heady with hints of lye, is more likely flavored with the scent of fresh strawberries, lemons, grapefruit and peaches. For the natural-cosmetics industry, the fragrance is pleasingly identifiable: it is the sweet smell of success.

Cucumber Cream. Organic materials have been used in cosmetics for years, but only in small amounts (to lend eye lids "the impudent luster of fresh celery") and always with a chemical preservative added to extend shelf life. Today, as a direct byproduct of the back-to-nature health-food boom and the growing concern about ecology, beauty products of purely natural ingredients are being marketed at an ever-increasing rate. Explains Los Angeles Cos metologist Gwen Seager Taylor: "Regular commercial products may not be harmful, but they are like eating white bread with preservatives added. Natural cosmetics, like whole-grain bread, give you back what nature gave you." Where as a year ago cucumber cleansing cream was obtainable only in a health-food store or an esoteric pharmacy, now there are scores of brands to choose from, all available in the natural-cosmetics shops that have sprung up across the country and in many drugstores and major department stores as well.

It is the smaller, independent manu facturers who provide the most comprehensive and insistently organic cosmetics. Gwen Seager Taylor's line -- Cosmetic Originals by Gwen--is distributed through health-food stores in California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New England. Gwen lipsticks ($2.50) are naturally colored with extracts of carrots, beets, eggplant, raspberries and blueberries; her face powder is a translucent blend of rice and corn. Of particular benefit to smog-bound skins are the natural-enzyme creams ($6) that "literally digest pollution" by dissolving toxic oils. Sallow, freckled or fading complexions are promised brighter days with Lights Up, a lotion of organic cucumbers and lemons.

In Manhattan, a tiny, green velvet-walled shop called "i" is only five weeks old and already doing close to $3,000 business a week in items like Quince Seed Conditioner ($3), Papaya Night Cream ($9.50) and Wild Raisin Eye Shadow ($5). Co-Owners Sandy Oringer and Lois Muller started out with a mailorder offer--$2 for a jar of strawberry cleansing cream, grapefruit freshener and lemon moisturizer--that drew such response that they formulated an entire line of raw-juice and oil-based cosmetics and found a chemist to put it together.

English Clay. "It is time," says Sandy, "for the American woman to begin to think in a new way about her skin care." Thinking about it, for i's customers, involves a daily regimen of the strawberry-juice cleanser, grapefruit-juice freshener, and lemon-juice moisturizer, a lubricating cream of blended peanut, sesame and sunflower oils, wheat germ and avocado, and a weekly application of an English clay mask ("English clay has more dampness in it").

Rumanian Skin-Care Specialist Mario Badescu opened his New York natural-cosmetics salon last year to a goulash of customers, including Marlene Dietrich and airline stewardesses ("They suffer," he says sadly, "from dehydrated skin"). Badescu scans a client's skin closely, then darts into his kitchen for the $15 treatment: a dough mask (made daily of wheat germ, oil and elder flower) for skin that "needs badly to breathe," yeast for acne, potato juice for oily skin and rosehip tea for broken capillaries. Because there is no preservative added, Badescu's products all require refrigeration and should be used within two months. But then, as he tells it, "they are not packaged for adornment but for use."

Charred Eggplant. The Natural Living Center in Wilton, Conn., opened two years ago, originally sold only natural foods and vitamins, now offers such far-out items as chlorophyll deodorant capsules ($3), toothpowder made of charred eggplant and sea salt (850), wild-honey shampoo ($9.95 for the giant size), an herb facial pack ($2.75) and lipsticks made of wheat-germ oil and available in 16 shades ($2.25). A big seller at the center, however, is plain old "Supermild Pure Castile" soap. Explains Cosmetician Kathy Pramer, "It's the hippies. They wash their hair with it, and their bodies, and they even brush their teeth with it."

Such organic ablutions would not have seemed excessive to the Roman Empress Poppaea, whose recipe for face cream was the runaway success of the 1st century. Her secret combination: bread and asses' milk.

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