Consuming Beauty

"It is difficult to imagine a world where beauty is not a product. After more than a hundred years of shopping for beauty, how can we imagine that it once existed outside of the market? Seeing beauty as something to be bought is part of a larger revolution that took place alongside industrialization and capitalism. That revolution was all about shopping, shopping for beauty and for our selves. At the same time cosmetic surgery was born, so was the department store. Both signaled a change in how we Americans defined ourselves and our happiness. We were no longer producers, but consumers. And we were only successful to the extent that we could consume more this year than last, more next year than this. Through shopping we learned to construct ourselves and our relationship to others. And it was middle-class white women who were first released from production in order to go on shopping sprees. That's why the first shopping areas were called Ladies' Mile. These ladies no longer made things like soap or clothes in the home; instead they entered department stores, palaces of desire, and started the revolution now known as consumer capitalism. At the center of ladies' shopping was the desire for a newly created product: 'beauty.'

"This moment of some women shifting their roles from producer to consumer and moving from the domestic realm into the newly invented public spaces of shopping is extremely important to the history of cosmetic surgery and, no doubt, the world more generally. Shopping for beauty was not completely dominated by profit alone. There was always an incredible optimism, and even a democratic spirit, to the beauty industry. For the first time in human history beauty wasn't something one was born with, a sort of luck of the genetic draw, but something one worked at with the aid of a variety of products, from slimming corsets to rouge to, at least by the twentieth century, cosmetic surgery. Buying beauty was an all-American activity.

"There were a variety of forces at play on the American lady consumer, not least of which was a new form of communication: advertising. The first advertisements were for items previously made in the home, things like soap and sewing machines. Feminist scholar Anne McClintock sees early advertisements as a form of 'commodity racism.' In other words, ladies bought into advertising not just to make themselves better, more like the people in the ads, but also to make themselves safe. Products like soap promised to protect consumers from becoming infected with the 'dirt' of other races or classes. The modern city brought a lot of confusion and boundary crossing, especially in the lives of 'lady shoppers.'

"In the same way that soap advertised protection from social 'dirt,' the beauty industry promised to protect ladies from ugliness. Beauty products provided boundary protection between the revolting and ugly working woman and the clean and beautiful lady of leisure. Beauty products protected middle-class white ladies from class and race contamination, and they simultaneously offered the promise of redemption for working women to become more 'beautiful' and therefore 'ladylike.' Consider the text from a 1934 advertisement for Camay soap.

" 'Beauty-beauty-beauty! Life's a constant search for it . . . For wherever you go, someone's eyes appraise you, someone's mind is made up — a friendship or an aversion is formed. You cannot, of course, change the contour of your chin or the color of your eyes. But you can change . . . the condition of your skin.'

"With cosmetic surgery and other forms of plastic beauty, people could and would change the contour of their chin, the shape of their noses, even the color of their skin, not just to be more beautiful, but to resemble those with the most money and power; that is, to be more white."