by Susan Faludi
“Is your face paying the price of success?” worried a 1988 Nivea skin cream ad, in which a business-suited woman with a briefcase rushes a child to day care—and catches a glimpse of her career-pitted skin in a store window. If only she were less successful, her visage would be more radiant. “The impact of work stress . . . can play havoc with your complexion,” Mademoiselle warned; it can cause “a bad case of dandruff,” “an eventual loss of hair” and, worst of all, weight gain. Most at risk, the magazine claimed, are “high-achieving women,” whose comely appearance can be ravaged by “executive stress.” In ad after ad, the beauty industry hammered home its version of the backlash thesis: women’s professional progress had downgraded their looks; equality had created worry lines and cellulite. This message was barely updated from a century earlier, when the late Victorian beauty press had warned women that their quest for higher education and employment was causing “a general lapse of attractiveness” and “spoiling complexions.”
The beauty merchants incited fear about the cost of women’s occupational success largely because they feared, rightly, that that success had cost them—in profits. Since the rise of the women’s movement in the ’70s, cosmetics and fragrance companies had suffered a decade of flat-to-declining sales, hair-product merchandisers had fallen into a prolonged slump, and hairdressers had watched helplessly as masses of female customers who were opting for simple low-cost cuts defected to discount unisex salons. In 1981, Revlon’s earnings fell for the first time since 1968; by the following year, the company’s profits had plunged a record 40 percent. The industry aimed to restore its own economic health by persuading women that they were the ailing patients—and professionalism their ailment. Beauty became medicalized as its lab-coated army of promoters, and real doctors, prescribed physician-endorsed potions, injections for the skin, chemical “treatments” for the hair, plastic surgery for virtually every inch of the torso. (One doctor even promised to reduce women’s height by sawing their leg bones.) Physicians and hospital administrators, struggling with their own financial difficulties, joined the industry in this campaign. Dermatologists faced with a shrinking teen market switched from treating adolescent pimples to “curing” adult female wrinkles. Gynecologists and obstetricians frustrated with a sluggish birthrate and skyrocketing malpractice premiums traded their forceps for liposuction scrapers. Hospitals facing revenue shortfalls opened cosmetic-surgery divisions and sponsored extreme and costly liquid-protein diet programs.
The beauty industry may seem the most superficial of the cultural institutions participating in the backlash, but its impact on women was, in many respects, the most intimately destructive—to both female bodies and minds. Following the orders of the ’80s beauty doctors made many women literally ill. Antiwrinkle treatments exposed them to carcinogens. Acid face peels burned their skin. Silicone injections left painful deformities. “Cosmetic” liposuction caused severe complications, infections, and even death. Internalized, the decade’s beauty dictates played a role in exacerbating an epidemic of eating disorders. And the beauty industry helped to deepen the psychic isolation that so many women felt in the ’80s, by reinforcing the representation of women’s problems as purely personal ills, unrelated to social pressures and curable only to the degree that the individual woman succeeded in fitting the universal standard—by physically changing herself.
The emblems of pulchritude marketed in the ’80s—frailty, pallor, puerility—were all beauty marks handed down by previous backlash eras. Historically, the backlash Venus has been an enervated invalid recovering on the chaise longue, an ornamental and genteel lady sipping tea in the drawing room, a child bride shielded from the sun. During the late Victorian era, the beauty industry glorified a cult of invalidism—and profited from it by promoting near-toxic potions that induced a chalky visage. The wasting-away look helped in part to unleash the nation’s first dieting mania and the emergence of anorexia in young women. In times of backlash, the beauty standard converges with the social campaign against wayward women, allying itself with “traditional” morality; a porcelain and unblemished exterior becomes proof of a woman’s internal purity, obedience, and restraint. The beautiful backlash woman is controlled in both senses of the word. Her physique has been domesticated, her appearance tamed and manicured as the grounds of a gentleman’s estate.
By contrast, athleticism, health, and vivid color are the defining properties of female beauty during periods when the culture is more receptive to women’s quest for independence. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, female athletes began to eclipse movie stars as the nation’s beauty archetypes; Coco Chanel’s tan launched a nationwide vogue in ruddy outdoor looks; and Helena Rubinstein’s brightly tinted cosmetics made loud and flamboyant colors acceptable. By the late 1920s and ’30s, however, the beauty press denounced women who tanned their faces and companies fired women who showed up at work sporting flashy makeup colors. Again, during World War II, invigorated and sun-tanned beauties received all the praise. Harper’s Bazaar described “the New American Look of 1943” this way: “Her face is out in the open and so is she. Her figure is lithe and strong. Its lines are lines of action. The glamour girl is no more.” With the war over, however, the beauty industry restored that girl—encouraged by a new breed of motivational research consultants who advised cosmetics companies to paint more passive images of femininity. Beauty publicists instructed women to inflate their breasts with padding or silicone, to frost their hair with carcinogenic dyes, to make themselves look paler by whitening their face and lips with titanium—to emulate, in short, that most bleached and medicalized glamour girl of them all, Marilyn Monroe.
Under the ’80s backlash, the pattern would repeat, as “Action Beauty,” as it was so labeled and exalted in ’70s women’s magazines, gave way to a sickbed aesthetic. It was a comprehensive transformation carried out at every level of the beauty culture—from the most superficially applied scent to the most invasive and dangerous operations.
FROM CHARLIE TO OPHELIA
In the winter of 1973, Charles Revson called a high-level meeting of Revlon executives. He had a revolutionary concept, he told them: a fragrance that celebrated women’s liberation. (It actually wasn’t that revolutionary: in the 1910s, perfume companies like Shalimar replaced weak lavenders with strong musks and marketed them to liberated New Women.) The Revlon team code-named the plan “Cosmo,” and they spent the next several months taking groups of women out to lunch and asking them what they wanted in a perfume.
The women told the Revlon interviewers that they were sick of hearing that fragrances were supposed to be defining them; they wanted a perfume that reflected the new self-image they had defined for themselves. The company’s market researchers considered this and eventually came up with a fragrance called Charlie, which they represented in ads with a confident and single working woman who signs her own checks, pops into nightclubs on her own, and even asks men to dance. Revlon introduced Charlie in 1973—and sold out its stock within weeks. Less than a year into its launch, Charlie had become the nation’s best-selling fragrance.
“Charlie symbolized that new lifestyle,” Revlon executive vice president Lawrence Wechsler recalls, “that said, you can be anything you want to be, you can do anything you want to do, without any criticism being directed at you. If you want to wear pantsuits at the office instead of a skirt, fine.” The success of the Charlie ad campaign inspired nearly a dozen knockoffs, from Max Factor’s Maxi (“When I’m in the Mood, There’s No Stopping Me”) to Chanel’s Cristalle (“Celebrate Yourself”), each featuring heroines who were brash, independent, and sexually assertive. Superathletes abounded, from Coty’s ice-skating champion, Smitty, to Fabergé’s roller-skating dynamo, Babe (“the fragrance for the fabulous new woman you’re becoming”)—in homage to Olympian Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Suddenly in 1982, Revlon retired the old Charlie ad campaign and replaced her with a woman who was seeking marriage and a family. The change wasn’t inspired b
y a decline in sales; Revlon’s managers just “sensed” that Charlie’s time had past. “We had gone a little too far with the whole women’s liberation thing,” Wechsler says. “And it wasn’t an issue anymore, anyway. There were more important issues now, like drugs. And then there’s the biological clock. There’s a need now for a woman to be less striving.” But the cancellation of the Charlie ad campaign, he insists, is actually a sign of women’s “progress.” The American woman has come so far, he says, “she doesn’t have to be so assertive anymore. She can be more womanly.”
The new campaign, however, didn’t appeal to female customers and Revlon had to replace it again in 1986. This time the company did away with the character of Charlie altogether and offered an assortment of anonymous women who were identified as “very Charlie” types (in an ad campaign created by Malcolm MacDougall, the same ad executive who produced Good Housekeeping’s New Traditional woman). In a sense, the company had come full circle: once again, the fragrance was defining the standard that women had to meet.
At least the “very Charlie” women were still walking and showing signs of life. By the mid-’80s, many of the fragrance ladies had turned into immobilized, chalky figurines. The perfume industry had decided to sell weaker fragrances to weaker women, and both the scent and the scented were toned down. “In the past few years, many women have worn fragrances that were just as strong as their push for a vice president position,” Jonathan King, marketing director for fragrance supplier Quest International, asserted in the press in 1987. But now, more “relaxed” fragrances with a more ladylike, restrained aura would take their place, restoring depleted feminine “mystery.” A host of ’80s perfume makers dispensed curative potions: “Aroma Therapy” they were called, fragrance lines to induce a “calming” mood in fretful careerist female wearers. These odors can even “relieve stress and depression without taking drugs,” International Flavors vice president Craig Warren announced cheerfully. Avon marketers even insisted that their variety, Tranquil Moments, had a proven soothing effect on female brain waves. But it wasn’t just the tranquilizing odors that symbolized the change. In a new round of perfume ad campaigns in the ’80s, the female models on display were no longer “pushing” either, as fragrance merchandisers focused their marketing drives around three stock “feminine” types: the upper-class lady of leisure, the bride, and the little girl.
In the first half of the ’80s, five hundred high-priced perfume brands claiming to offer an upper-class socialite scent flooded the market. (To reinforce the point, at least a half-dozen lines added gold flecks to their high-society perfumes.) As couture designers sought lucrative fragrance licensing contracts for themselves, their names started showing up on perfume bottles instead of women’s; Bill Blass replaced Babe Didrikson. The women who did make it into perfume ads were representatives of gentility or glamour, not independence or athleticism. To promote Passion, Parfums International deployed Elizabeth Taylor to play the aristocratic lady; she read poems in TV ads and hosted ladies’ teas in department stores. Even middlebrow Avon tried the upscaling method, buying the rights to such perfume names as Giorgio, Oscar de la Renta, and Perry Ellis and introducing Deneuve at $165 an ounce.
As the fragrance industry geared up its second strategy, the marriage pitch, demure and alabaster brides soon proliferated in perfume ads, displacing the self-confident single women. In 1985, Estee Lauder unveiled Beautiful, the fragrance “for all your beautiful moments.” But the only “moment” the ads ever depicted was a wedding day. (The “Beautiful Moments” campaign for women happened to coincide with Omega watches’ “Significant Moments” campaign for men, making for an unintentionally instructive back-to-back contrast in many magazines: on one page, she lowered her veil; on the next, he raised his fist to celebrate “the pure joy of victory.”) Bijan for Women even spelled out its promarital message in black and white: the perfume maker’s 1988 ads advised women that they showed “Bad Taste” to cohabit, “Good Taste” to marry and get pregnant, and “exceptional Good Taste” to be “proudly wearing your wedding band.”
Women in the fragrance ads who weren’t having babies were being turned into them—as one company after another selected a prepubescent girl as the new icon of femininity. “Perfume is one of the great pleasures of being a woman,” the caption read in Vogue, accompanying a photo of a baby-girl Lolita, her face heavily made up and blond curls falling suggestively across cherubic cheeks. “In praise of woman,” was the 1989 ad slogan for Lord & Taylor’s perfume Krizia, but the only woman praised in this ad was a preschooler dressed in Victorian clothes, her eyes cast demurely downward. “You’re a wholesome woman from the very beginning,” murmured still another perfume ad—of a ladylike five year old. Even one of Revlon’s new “very Charlie” types was under ten.
But none of these marketing strategies paid off. The flood of upscale scents, in fact, caused fragrance sales to fall in 1986—the first drop in years. At prestige outlets, sales of the upscale concentrated perfumes fell by more than $20 million between 1980 and 1985. At Avon, by 1988, quarterly earnings were dropping 57 percent, less than half its beauty profits were coming from U.S. sales, and the company had to fire one-third of its sales managers. By appealing to affluent “ladies,” that company had ignored its most loyal and numerous consumers: working-class women. Avon might have consulted its own research, which showed that its typical customer was a woman with a high-school education, blue-collar job, two children, and an annual household income of $25,000. How was she supposed to buy a $165 1-ounce bottle of perfume?
With the lures of wealth, marriage, and infancy proving insufficient inducement, the perfume ad campaigns pushed idealization of weak and yielding women to its logical extreme—and wheeled out the female corpse. In Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium ads, a woman was stretched out as if on a bier, her eyes sealed shut, a funereal floral arrangement by her ashen face. In Jovan’s Florals ads, a modern-day Ophelia slipped into supreme repose, her naked body strewn with black and white orchids. The morbid scene sported this caption: “Every woman’s right to a little indulgence.”
KEEPING A DAILY DE-AGING DIARY
The cosmetics industry adopted a familiar Victorian maxim about children as its latest makeup “trend” in the late ’80s. As a feature headline put it, “The Makeup Message for the Summer: Be Seen But Not Heard.” The beautiful woman was the quiet one. Mademoiselle’s cosmetics articles praised the “muted” look, warned against “a mouth that roars,” and reminded women that “being a lady is better . . . better than power, better than money.” Vogue placed a finger to women’s lips and appealed for silence: “There’s a new sense of attractiveness in makeup. . . . [N]othing ever ‘shouts.’” Ten years earlier, makeup, like fragrance, came in relentlessly “spirited” and “exuberant” colors with “muscle.” The “Outspoken Chanel” woman wore nail and face color as loud as her new “confidence” and “witty voice.” Now cosmetics tiptoed, ghostly, across the skin. Partly, of course, this new beauty rule was just the by-product of that time-honored all-American sales strategy: Create demand simply by reversing the dictates of style. But the selection of the muffled maiden as the new ideal was also a revealing one, a more reassuring image for beauty merchants who were unnerved by women’s desertion of the cosmetics counter.
The makeup marketers rolled out the refined upper-class lady, too; like the fragrance sellers, they hoped to make more money off fewer women by exhorting affluent baby-boom women to purchase aristocratic-sounding beauty products—with matching high-class prices. But again this marketing maneuver backfired. The heaviest users of makeup are teens and working-class women—and the formidable price tags on these new “elite” makeups just scared them off. The makeup companies’ tactics only caused their earnings to fall more sharply—soon, leading securities analysts were warning investors to avoid all cosmetics stocks.
Finally, though, these companies came up with a more lucrative way to harness backlash attitudes to their sales needs. Many major
cosmetics companies began peddling costly medicinal-sounding potions that claimed to revert older female skin to baby-pale youth and to shield women’s “sensitive” complexions from the ravages of environmental, and especially professional, exposure. By exploiting universal fears of mortality in the huge and aging baby-boom population—exploiting it in women only, of course—the industry finally managed to elevate its financial state.
By the late ’80s, entering a cosmetics department was like stumbling into a stylish sanitarium. The salesclerks were wearing white nurse uniforms, and the treatments were costly and time-consuming regimens with medicinal names and packages, accompanied by physicians’ endorsements. Clarins’s $92 “Biological Tightener” came in a twenty-day treatment rack lined with test-tube-shaped “ampoules.” Glycel, an “antiaging” cream, boasted the support of heart surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard. La Prairie offered “cellular therapy” from their “world-renowned medical facility” in Switzerland—and its $225 bottles were filled with “capsules” and came with little spoons for proper dosage. Clinique’s “medically trained” staff urged women to exfoliate daily, chart their epidermal progress in a “Daily De-Aging Workbook,” and monitor skin health on the company’s “computer”—a plastic board with sliding buttons that was closer to a Fisher-Price Busybox than a Macintosh.
References to female fertility were replete at the cosmetics counter, too, as the beauty industry moved to exploit the “biological-clock” anxieties that popular culture had done so much to inflame. The labels of dozens of beauty treatments claimed remedial gynecological ingredients: “sheep placentas,” “bovine embryos,” and even, bizarrely, “human placental protein.” Also on display, in keeping with the demands of ’80s backlash fashion, were $50 “breast creams” and “bust milks” to boost a woman’s bra size—products not seen in department stores since the 1950s.