Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750–1830

• Conclusion
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 174-182
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CONCLUSION

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, cosmetics (primarily fards) were associated with the court and aristocracy, markers of rank more than signs of beauty. Shops sold a multitude of beauty aids, but many elites still made their beauty products at home. As the century progressed, these same products were diversified (with new names and uses) and sold more cheaply and widely, appealing to an increasingly savvy and financially stable middle and working class. As the new Parisian consumer market of proto-luxuries grew, a shift toward natural fashions also took place. Though critics of luxury justified increased consumerism as part of the redefinition of taste, paint was labeled artifice to be rejected by both women and men. Visible cosmetics symbolized aristocratic deception and the possibility of physical and moral decay, rather than “modernity.”

Men and women who bought and wore makeup could not easily escape the barrage of criticism aimed at them from a diversity of voices. Critics sought to excise men from the toilette, simplify women’s beauty practices, and reform both genders’ behavior in society. The goal was to separate the rabble and the decadent aristocracy from the respectable classes by defining limits to taste and nature. Critics fought a determined battle against the forces of Old Regime fashion by badgering and cajoling wearers of cosmetics, frightening them with the dangers of resisting change. By the end of the century, these critics, on the surface, had won: natural fashion that stressed simplicity and youthful innocence replaced the reign of the coquette, even if it mimicked the previous ideals of beauty. Doctors joined in this chorus of criticisms. The aesthetic of the natural was allied with the medical imperatives of health and hygiene. Newly professionalized physicians positioned themselves as the antithesis to charlatans, ready to protect the buying public from shoddy potions and dangerous recipes.

The attacks on artifice by philosophes, moralists, and medical professionals challenged but did not destroy the commerce of beauty. Sellers responded by aggressively adopting the language of their critics and building a new set of associations for their products. Their combination of Enlightened and medical language with promises of personal pleasure helped transformed old cosmetics into new, acceptable purchases. Both male and female sellers helped create new markets by advertising legitimate uses, images, and ingredients for their products. Sellers of cosmetics touted guarantees, effectiveness, and safety. Alongside makers of secret remedies, they petitioned for medical patents, drew on scientific language and altered (or pretended to alter) their ingredients. They renamed their products to associate with Rousseau’s cult of the natural. Or, in a move to distance themselves from tainted French products, they evoked Oriental locales, emphasizing exotic (and possibly erotic) possibilities. Demand for wigs declined, benefiting makers of hair products who targeted the well-off and insecure male consumer with promises of hair regeneration.

Retailers rebutted the taint of aristocratic immorality by creating effective counter imagery for their goods. What they did not do was take sides. Marketers did not try to define cosmetics as either solely the markings of the aristocratic courtier (and thus ripe for emulation) or the realm of the new respectable elite. They did not attempt to discipline women’s behavior, entering the toilette with only their products and how to apply them. They accepted the premise that the new aesthetic of natural beauty was now the norm, but they offered their very artificial products as a means for achieving it. And, more important, they did not accept the social, moral, and political strictures that were associated with the new fashion. Instead, marketers alluded to utility alongside promises of miracles and personal pleasure. What type of woman or man a buyer transformed into was left to the individual’s choice, since sellers simply laid out possible outcomes, not a strict definition of gender roles. Social meaning and rank were mostly left unsaid. The bourgeois matron could coexist alongside the coquette, the actress, or the petit maître.

They did, however, want to serve as the main advisors, if not of gender roles, than of the sphere of buying beauty. Creators of new ploys and products responded to their customers’ desires, hoping to be able to shape them as well as fulfill them. Advertisers were well aware of the growing public of buyers that demanded more services from their local shops. The publicity of cosmetics, both in newsprint studied here and in less available sources, was directly aimed at effecting these buyers’ choices. Buyers needed sellers’ advice to make informed choices if they wished to be safe and natural. With this help, women and men could use new and newly redefined products in the privacy of their homes. What these marketers stressed was that giving up all forms of beautification was not necessary or reasonable. Sellers, and increasingly journal articles as well, invited buyers to enter the public sphere of consumerism and vanity sure of their options.

The consumer revolution created a new hierarchy of legitimate voices in which those with access to the market and publicity could triumph over their critics. Store owners had a distinct advantage because they had direct links to their customers, whereas advice writers and journalist could not control how women (and men) used their work. The face-to-face contact enhanced sellers’ position as the ultimate definers of fashion and consumption. Other taste masters, however, were not banished from the toilette. Doctors and journalists could compete more effectively by entering the sphere of commerce. Rather than just criticize cosmetics, they had to offer alternatives to undermine the growing power of the market. Doctors were especially connected to cosmetics sales, both through the system of patents and their own forays into remedies. Critics of artifice could position their articles next to advertisements or take on the system of marketing directly. Increasingly, commentators shifted from a focus on the actions of women in private, to the interaction of buyers and sellers in public. The falsity of artifice was joined by the falsity of the market, ready to dupe innocent and wholly natural women into frivolous and even dangerous purchases.

Despite criticisms, publicity and marketing had a growing importance in consumer choices. Daniel Roche argues that the new commercial methods “such as nascent forms of advertising, classified advertisements, and mail-order” proposed “liberation through reading, emancipation through consumption … Papers afforded women promotion and independence based on the values of a culture of subversive frivolity.”¹ Advertisements provided a space in which buyers could see their desires and concerns reflected alongside articles on changing fashions. Buyers were increasingly educated in the language of natural beauty, participating in “subversive” redefinitions using complex artifice. These redefinitions created a new more powerful relationship between the wearer and their own self-presentation. In this way, the commerce of cosmetics, with its publicity and marketing, played a key role in encouraging individual choice and “liberation” of women (and men) within the limits of acceptable behavior.

Whether marketers succeeded in altering fashion choices and meanings is tested in the actual uses of consumers. Did consumers, faced with the prospect of natural fashion, throw away their bottles or did they continue painting while advocating purity of the face? How did men adapt to the limitations on their toilettes? The answers can be guessed from the previous chapters, despite only indirect anecdotal evidence. The number of advertisements, patents, and visibility of sellers, matched by the increased criticisms, indicates that late eighteenth-century French men and women still wore and owned paint. But how did women feel about their use of paint in this changing world? How did men feel about giving up the pleasures of the toilette? These questions are much more difficult to answer. There are few honest and personal discussions of cosmetics at the height of their use, and there are just as few during their decline. Despite these limitations, a few examples allow a glimpse into how individuals responded to the contradictory demands of the new ideals of beauty.

The most visible consumer for natural fashions and the one with the most influence was undoubtedly Marie Antoinette. She was said to have helped calm the overuse of rouge and beauty patches when she and her ladies at the Petit Trianon adopted more natural styles.² Her personal taste, outside court regalia, was for simpler fashions, as depicted in Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits. The queen adopted the robe à chemise, a style imported from England, which proved popular among her admirers. When the Salon of 1783 exhibited Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait of the queen in such a dress and straw hat, the public was so shocked by its immodesty that the picture was removed and replaced by a more formal one.³ The first portrait, thus, represents the new natural fashion of Rousseau, while the second depicts acceptable court dress. In both portraits, however, Marie Antoinette’s cheeks and lips are depicted as rosy red and her skin is pure snow white. The cheek color highlights her cheekbone and flushes down her face, from her ear to jaw line. This is not the perfectly round circles of color found at the beginning of the century, but neither is it much different from the images of royalty since the late reign of Louis XV. This flush of color resembles that of an embarrassed child, rendered uneven by the painter to indicate its naturalness. Yet, nothing in the queen’s stance or look link her color to her emotions: her stare is confident and slightly coquettish. Despite the shift in fashions and aesthetics, the queen’s rouged cheeks (whether natural or applied) remain similar in purpose and in intensity in both portraits.

The queen’s shift to the natural represents the elite’s full acceptance of this aesthetic, even while promoting the color of rouged cheeks. The dual portraits of the daughters of the Genevan banker Jacques Rilliet, painted in 1790 by David, underscore how important it was for the once profligate elite, especially those whose wealth was suspect, to redefine themselves as respectable. According to Jerrine Mitchell, these paintings mimicked self-portraits of Vigée-Lebrun that stressed her virtue and talents, traits these aristocrats wished to emulate from their social inferiors. Newly married, the Comtesse de Sorcy (twenty years old and a recent mother) and the Marquise d’Orvilliers (eighteen) are painted wearing the height of fashionable dress and hair, without any sign of their wealth or station.⁴ The comtesse wears a robe à chemise and a shawl, with her own luxurious curls falling on her shoulders. But her hair is lightly powdered, her cheeks sport round red patches, and her beautiful white complexion matches her dress and hair (see cover art). She is the perfect amalgamation in one person of the ideals of natural fashion and the continued use of rouge and powder. Her sister is less pretty, painted as plumper, ruddier in color, and wearing darker clothing than her almost alabaster sister. This contrast in color created the illusion of “an implied equivalence between appearance and personal identity,” distinguishing the sisters from each other.⁵ Makeup, or its implication on canvas, could function as a means of defining character, even as critics of artifice hoped it would no longer get in the way of a legible read. Yet, the white face, towering head of curls, and rouged cheeks on the comtesse also evoke an enactment in costume of the new respectable elite by a very young girl. These sisters epitomized youthfulness and its suggestion of true beauty. Married to wealthy, powerful men as teenagers, they hoped to represent elite womanhood through their youthful, natural traits, not despite them. Tellingly, when David painted the comtesse’s husband the next year, he is wearing an English-style suit and a lush head of his own hair.⁶

David set the standard for these portraits, and it is difficult to know whether these women dressed in robe à chemise in their daily lives. Portraits do not allow us to directly access the thoughts of those who posed about their makeup. Through their memoirs and letters, several key figures of the period have left us with traces of what it meant to live through a revolution in taste. Mlle Clairon, a highly successful actress at the Comédie-Française, helped redefine the use of paint and artifice in theater. Moralists traditionally accused actresses of using their beauty to seduce and corrupt men and thus society.⁷ A pornographic tale recounted a fictionalized version of Clairon’s early days as an actress, stressing her ability to use makeup to restore her virginity.⁸ In her memoirs, written when she was in her late sixties in 1791–92, Clairon hoped to erase her youthful proclivities and solidify her reputation as an actress of great skill and clout, helping improve the status of performers in general. To do so, she deemphasized the importance of beauty in her professional life. When she fought the church over the ban on sacraments for actors and organized a counterfuneral for Crébillon they could attend, she and the other actresses wore no rouge to stress their piety and respectability.⁹ She also strongly critiqued the fashion of wearing thick layers of white face paint on stage, arguing that this practice “absorbs the physiognomy, hides from view the precious mobility of the facial muscles …” and thus her ability to render emotions and characters to the audience. Yet, she saw no problem with helping nature when it fit the role, softening or darkening her eyebrows and applying powder because these practices did not hide emotions.¹⁰

Her emphasis on a natural and readable stage physiognomy contradicted her use of rouge in private. In her fifties, she bluntly explained to her lover’s wife that he preferred her because “I wear rouge, which gives me a younger and gayer look, and you are of such paleness as to squelch all possible desire.”¹¹ Meaning to offer sympathetic words of advice, the actress fully understood the association of sexuality and artifice, especially for women who were too old to seem naturally beautiful. She had a pragmatic relationship to makeup. She used it when it fit the character she was playing, whether as a mistress or as an actress, as long as it allowed her the ability to express herself honestly. Clairon did not critique women for wearing fard but rather understood that, in social circles that advocated youth and naturalness, most women hoped to please their male companions by painting on their lost youth.

Yet, in her memoirs, she also attempted to depict herself as willingly giving up the coquetry of youth when she reached a respectable retirement age. At age forty, she spotted her first wrinkle and claimed that she soon gave up both her career and her conquests. She never married because men automatically based their love on beauty, and when this beauty faded, “one rarely finds qualities that can console one of its loss.”¹² As an actress, however well respected, she depended on her lovers for financial support. Despite her claims, she continued to act privately and attempted to keep her lover faithful with the above-mentioned rouge, even though he eventually left her for a younger woman.¹³ Her hope was to gain respect from men, rather than desire, but as a mistress, she had no recourse when her lovers chose to give her neither. Clairon could not imagine a world outside the boundaries of youthful beauty, but she had to keep trying to reproduce it for her own survival. Though her memoirs claim to be advice for how to survive the loss of beauty by emphasizing talent and character, she could not take her own advice to heart. Despite her failures to age gracefully, the section of her memoirs on dealing with wrinkles was reprinted in the Journal des dames as advice to young girls. Despite her background as an actress, she had managed through her memoirs to whitewash her past and sell herself as the perfect representation of respectable old age.¹⁴

The painter Girodet, student of David, provides both a personal commentary on his appearance (specifically his hair) and artistic representations of himself and other men of his generation. From Girodet’s earliest portraits during the Revolution to his late work before his death at age fifty-seven in 1824, his hair played a key role in exemplifying his social, political, and professional roles. Girodet was not a typical revolutionary man. He was caught up in the events of the period both as an artist and a freethinker. Yet, his struggle to define his masculinity through his art exemplifies the difficulties presented to men who were trying to both reject Old Regime artifice while remaining consumers of current fashions. In his attempt to create a legacy for himself, Girodet’s hair, like that of many men, functioned as “a performance, one that happens at the boundary of self-expression and social identity, of creativity and conformity.”¹⁵ As an actor in his own romance, Girodet constantly readjusted his image to fit the masculine roles of the period.

When Girodet arrived in Italy in 1790 to study painting at the French Academy in Rome, he still wore a wig and powder. As a student, however, he fired his wig-maker for lack of funds and decided instead to wear his hair natural and thus short. He was proud of his savings despite being told that “in this new costume, I look like … a bust of Brutus who killed Cesar.”¹⁶ His friends, however, worried that the conservative Romans would mistake him for a Jacobin. Even the director of the academy advised him to return to powder for his own safety. He admitted that “as soon as I can have the smallest possible pony-tail, that would be for me, an anchor and a protection.”¹⁷ Soon after, he was almost killed by a mob of antirepublican Italians and became a revolutionary hero back in France. Girodet’s revolutionary experiences confirmed the importance of self-presentation and the symbolic power of fashion.¹⁸

Girodet’s hair problems in Italy only got worse. Rather than grow longer, in 1794 his “beautiful blond hair” started to fall out due to a bout of illness. Fearing it was syphilis, Girodet was ashamed of his symptoms and hid them from his colleagues. They deduced that this early baldness was caused by his rejection of powder and grease, assuming like many that these cosmetics had protective functions. Contrary to his newfound Jacobin values, he was forced to “wear wig.”¹⁹ Girodet felt betrayed by his own body, obliging him to create an artificial self in public and most tellingly in painting. In a 1795 self-portrait, Girodet painted himself with a lush, shiny, long, dark head of hair topped by a wide brimmed hat popular in republican circles (figure 12). Emulating the long silky hair of his own Endymion (an example of a highly androgynous Romantic male nude), Girodet recreated for himself an idealized masculinity, both in his painting and in the masquerade of wig and dress. The purchase of the wig (and possibly cosmetic hair products), in a period of natural hairstyles, allowed him to play-act the sexually charged role of artist while waiting for his real hair to grow back. Though in life, as in art, he believed that if men were “elegant, without affectation, they will always know how to please,” he realized that it was still necessary to borrow artifice to recreate the supposed unkempt beauty of a romantic hero.²⁰

As he aged and his career did not have the resonance he hoped for, Girodet’s self-portraits became fiercer but no less theatrical. Tellingly when his hair started to fall out, he hid his receding hairline with the use of flying Titus curls, a trick used by many other artists. His last portrait right before his death shows him at his work-table with a quite healthy head of hair. One of his students corrected this vain lie after his death.²¹ Though Girodet painted older mentors with obvious hair loss, he was never able to depict himself or his contemporaries with follicular weakness. As a recent essay on his portraits argues, Girodet was no Rousseau. He did not wish to display his inner-self to the world. Rather he created fantasies of his ideal selves.²² The revolutionary and Napoleonic periods masculinized art and society, tying men to fraternal brotherhood and later militaristic empire. Girodet hoped to enact this highly active masculinity by a continued use of artifice. Natural masculinity (whether neoclassical or Romantic) demanded unkempt beauty and flowing hair. Men were willing to adopt artifice to achieve this ideal despite the costs and the contradictions involved.

Though neither Clairon nor Girodet represent everyday French beauty practices, their memoirs nonetheless point to the ambiguity with which the new models of fashion and taste were adopted.²³ Both played with artifice, while accepting, however grudgingly, the changes in aesthetics. Old age was the most difficult aspect of this new natural beauty and both tried to fight off inevitable decline. Their conciliation of artifice and naturalness signaled the complexity inherent in ideals of transparency. Undoubtedly, many other painters of the face found the transition to natural beauty both difficult and unwise.

Figure 12. Anne Louis Girodet De Roussy-Trioson, Self Portrait (1795), Réunion des musées nationaux/Art Resource

Never truly scrubbed clean of its marks and vices, the visage remained a complex and ultimately treacherous read at the end of the eighteenth century. As the Baronne d’Oberkirch rightly pointed out, the fad of the natural, meant to define the tastes of the new elite as distinct from the rabble and aristocracy, could just as easily be adopted by courtesans who understood better than anyone the wiles of fashion.²⁴ This renewed fear of successful emulation was played out in an 1801 directory of Parisian prostitutes. One woman was described as “pretty enough … her complexion, like many others, needs the help of art to seem vermillion.” Male customers were still assumed to want healthy, though artificial color. Yet, other women are described in the same terms with which Rousseau characterized Julie. For instance, Angélique was “not a perfect beauty,” but “she is the only one who has both good physical and moral traits.”²⁵ Both the triumph and ultimate failure of natural beauty can be found in these young women’s charms: the moral and aesthetic criteria of transparent beauty had entered the bordello, hitherto the empire of artifice and corruption.

The culture of French beauty by the early nineteenth century contained many modern-day elements. It coexisted with natural fashions, entered the homes of all ranks, was aggressively marketed, and emphasized the possibility of self-fashioning. As the nineteenth century progressed, cosmetics continued to illicit strong opposition alongside more covert forms of support. Makeup became more gendered but did not disappear from view.²⁶ Unlike England and America, where paint was increasingly associated with prostitution and decadence, in France makeup alongside perfume and creams remained adaptable items within the toilettes of respectable women. Today, the French commerce of beauty, headed by the behemoth L’Oréal, remains associated with the values of its predecessors: medical legitimacy, guaranteed creation of beauty, and pleasurable ownership. Despite the common assumption that it was in the twentieth century that broad use of cosmetics first occurred, eighteenth-century sellers of rouge, creams, and powders had already taken the first step in turning what had been an aristocratic prerogative into an acceptable (if hidden) part of many women and some men’s toilettes.