The Business of Beauty: Gender and the Body in Modern London by Jessica P. Clark (review)

Anyone who studies beauty, especially female beauty, waits for the inevitable comment about some individual's preference for "natural" beauty. As Jessica P. Clark asserts in her important new study on British beauty industries in London, this battle between natural and artificial beauty is at least over a century old. Then— and, as I suspect, now—the distinction and the debates around natural beauty speak to much wider concerns about gendered expectations of discretion, concealment, and polite corporal comportment. Further, debate over cosmetics are simultaneously about fashioning appropriate classed, raced, and gendered bodies, making them especially loaded, if seemingly anodyne.

Clark's new study of the complex London beauty scene from 1850 to 1914 reveals that Victorian men and women used beauty goods to change their appearance in spite of the powerful rhetoric denouncing such use. The denunciation has been well documented in the literature, but the use of cosmetics alongside the critique is an important insight into the history of beauty and the body. If it is difficult to chart these intimate bodily practices and what they meant for the individuals who undertook them, The Business of Beauty reveals the material and social consequences of the strange entanglements of covert use for those on the commercial side of the transactions. Beauty retailers navigated a culture that condemned artificial beauty and desired authenticity yet laid the groundwork for a host of beauty projects. As Clark argues, "at the centre of Victorian and Edwardian body politics" were a significant number of beauty professionals, including "hairdressers, barbers, perfumers, wigmakers, complexion specialists, hair-restorers, chiropodists, electrolysis operators, manicurists, and beauty 'culturists'" (p. 24). Collectively and individually, they made noteworthy profits. Natural beauty—and, in particular, a specific British form of natural beauty loaded with presumptions of gender, class, and race—may have been desired, but it took a lot of time, money, and knowledge to achieve.

As Clark's work compellingly reveals, both men and women were involved in the business of beautification as retailers and consumers. Both selling and buying required complex strategies to retain the appearance of respectability, and both caused conflict. Mining legal records, Clark reveals the sometimes-intimate nature of the conflict, as well as the significant sums of money involved in pursuing beauty. Sarah Levenson appeared in London courts—both criminal and civil—multiple times between 1858 and 1878, and her case has been previously studied. Clark argues, however, that it was the space of her operation in London's West End that was a considerable factor in the ongoing conflicts. The business of beauty involved negotiating London's finely tuned geographic and spatial distinctions as well as formulating and coveting various preparations and techniques.

Business operators self-fashioned identities as purveyors of beauty as they assisted with the self-fashioning of individuals. Those professional identities, rooted in fictionalized autobiographies, in turn, helped to forge wider ideas about who could embody a British type of beauty based on loose, culturally constructed ideas of Whiteness. In chapters on perfumer Eugène Rimmel, luxury beauty provider Jeannette Pomeroy (Jeannette Scalé), and the early London years of beauty entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein, Clark reveals how business men and women navigated a competitive modern beauty industry by widening their consumer base, innovating with goods and practices, and making use of transnational flows of goods, ideas, and people. Modern beauty businesses crafted personas to attract and retain customers, attempting to ensure respectability in using their services and adding flair and fine taste by combining British industry with appeals to various continental luxuries. As beauty culturists fashioned consumer bodies, so too did they self-fashion professional identities, and both led to legal action, as in the case of Pomeroy, who lost the rights to the name and persona she initially created.

Beauty, as Clark argues, developed in networks that mapped onto London's geography and flowed to and from there along global circuits. By the early twentieth century, entanglements...