"Hope in a Jar."

The title does not refer to the very popular product by Philosophy, but instead to a sardonic comment on what the cosmetics industry peddles to women. For my women's studies class this semester I had to do an article review, and I chose the cosmetics industry topic because it fit in pretty well with stuff I like to cover here on my blog. The research was fascinating. I have always wondered why women shave their legs, pluck their eyebrows and slather on face cream. Truly, the agonizing process we go through is a modern, man-made invention.



Article Review: Making Faces: The Cosmetics Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender. 1890-1930, by Kathy Peiss.


Once upon a time, the cosmetics industry did not have the iron-clad grip on feminine aesthetics in society as it does today. In fact, there did not use to be a “cosmetics industry.” Prior to the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, women rarely entertained a “painted face.” If we were to look at the phenomena of cosmetics and femininity as scientists, we would regard it somewhat like the evolutionary phenomena of punctuated equilibrium. For a long time, on the landscape of society, there was nothing and then suddenly the cosmetics industry exploded. What led to this? According this article by Kathy Peiss, it was the emergence of the “New Woman” that had everything to do with new cultural standards of appearance. The New Woman had broken out of the “Cult of Domesticity” and began to embrace a life of her own. This new life included finding a new identity, and the rigidly moralistic standards of the Victorians no longer held up. Like any good capitalist society, advertisers sprung at the chance to mass market products that had lingered on shelves, gathering dust. The author of the article calls this the “Commercialization of Cosmetics.” Once interest was shown, the wonderful game of supply-and-demand took over. What followed were three distinct lines of trade: the “class,” “mass,” and “ethnic” markets.


You’ve no doubt heard the saying “cleanliness is next to godliness” and also the saying “what is beautiful is good.” It is these two common phrases that shaped the cosmetics industry as we know it. The Cult of Cleanliness had everything to do with the mass amounts of soaps, lotions and tonics that were marketed to women. People who could afford to be clean were usually people who had money, and so the notion of a clean and fresh appearance became marked by the mutual notion of affluence and success. This is where the class market came into play. Building from that coveted status, the cosmetics industry promoted a new standard of beauty. Beauty parlor owners led the charge on beauty culture. It was in the salon that a woman was able to be pampered and also where she learned of all those great emerging products that were guaranteed to change her life.


It is thus that we see the waning emphasis on inner beauty. External beauty was now the prize cow that was paraded around by magazines, drugstores, beauty parlors and advertisers. Forget being a good person! Rouge was where it was at. Where advertisers had scorned beauty products before and placed them on the back pages of their publications, the surging popularity of beauty culture brought cosmetics advertisements to the forefront (literally, they were then featured prominently in magazines).


The entertainment industry jumped on the bandwagon and soon movie stars were the faces that launched a thousand cosmetic sales. This is a trend we still see today. We have Drew Barrymore hawking Lash Blast and Queen Latifah showing off Cover Girl. This appeal to popularity was the final step in commercializing cosmetics.


The ethnic market really launched by support of African-Americans, especially in the beauty parlor context. The beauty parlor enabled African-Americans to own businesses that were inexpensive to set up and maintain, and also were vehicles for increasing community togetherness. Unfortunately, one of the most popular “treatments” sold to African-Americans by whites AND blacks was skin bleach. It was a prevalent stereotype in those days that the lighter your complexion was, the better you were as a human being. This resonated with the emerging notion that it was external looks that counted far more than inner beauty. Whether we are speaking of the class market, ethnic market or mass market it looked like everyone was buying the same lie.


The cosmetics industry had succeeded in constructing women as objects while appealing to them as subjects. In an unsurprising twist, most of this was orchestrated by males. It is hard to grasp how women allowed themselves to be told what true femininity was by a predominantly masculine industry. In a stroke of marketing genius we were told that the more products we slathered on our faces, the more feminine and appealing we would become. This meant merely one thing: buy more products. The cosmetics industry is but a microcosm that illustrates capitalism at its best.

To conclude this review, please refer to this powerful passage by Kathy Peiss:

If in the early twentieth century, some Americans sought to define female
selfhood in meaningful ways (through the act of thinking or through productive labor, for example) the cosmetics industry foregrounded the notion that one’s “look” was not only the expression of female identity but its essence as well. In this, the mass, class, and African American ends of the industry converged. Although the cosmetics industry may not have controlled the discourse over femininity, the multibillion-dollar industry that exists today is testimony to its ability to convince women to purchase, as Charles Revson cynically puts it, “hope in a jar.”

Peiss, K. (1990). Making Faces: The cosmetic industry and the cultural construction
of gender, 1890-1930. Genders 7, 143-69.