Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830 (review)

Morag Martin's historical account of the evolution of the cosmetic trade in France from 1750 to 1830 nuances the traditional image of a decadent ancien régime aesthetic of personal beauty, steeped in artifice and frivolity, which was replaced by more natural or unpretentious bourgeois tastes. As she shows, powdered wigs and rouge did not disappear overnight ('Robespierre wore his wig powdered throughout the Revolution', p. 161), nor did the production and distribution of beauty products collapse along with the monarchy. Indeed, the cosmetic industry adapted and expanded by targeting a wider clientele, by offering more affordable products, and by developing new marketing techniques. The author has examined beauty manuals and newspaper advertisements for cosmetics. She also draws on literary sources, providing a picture of a society in which the desire for a redefined form of beauty, associated with new medical concerns over the safety of many ingredients, led to the transformation and the extension of an industry that had been associated with outdated aristocratic values. Martin points out the changes that did occur. While cosmetics had been heavily used by both men and women of the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie, they gradually became a predominantly female concern, at almost all social levels: 'Makeup became more gendered but did not disappear from view' (p. 182). As it shifted from a marker of social class to one of gender, make-up became a more ordinary commodity that was produced, advertised, and distributed through early forms of mass-marketing techniques: 'newspaper advertisements experienced a huge growth in the second half of the eighteenth century' (p. 54). In the process, the perfumers' guild lost part of its power to regulate and control goods in terms of price and quality, since it was 'ultimately unable to prevent others from profiting from a growing market' (p. 38). Advertising aimed at a more varied female clientele both relied on and propagated new images of femininity, the variants of which — 'natural artifice', Oriental fantasies — are detailed in successive chapters of Selling Beauty. The author also devotes a chapter to those segments of the cosmetic industry that catered to men's perceived needs, particularly in terms of hair loss: 'Wigmakers, inventors of potions, and doctors vied with one another for influence over men's heads' (p. 172). In this case, traditional masculine vanity, associated with new medical concerns over the causes and effects of baldness, led to the marketing of a series of products that purportedly prevented or even reversed hair loss. It thus seems that for much of the cosmetic industry, aside from the obvious issues of technical progress, little seems to have changed since the eighteenth century, when competition and advertising produced profitable norms of female beauty and male potency. Martin weaves her different sources (literary, journalistic, medical) into a coherent and convincing account of a social phenomenon that should not be dismissed as trivial, since the cosmetic industry managed to expand its reach, in both economic and cultural terms, during a period of rapid social change and sudden political upheavals.