The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  The professional collegial spirit that has helped keep the fraudulent nature of the industry’s claims fairly quiet was belatedly broken by Professor Albert Kligman of the University of Pennsylvania—whose whistle-blowing must be put in context: He is the developer of Retin-A, the one substance that does seem to do something, including subjecting the skin to inflammation, sunlight intolerance, and continuous heavy peeling. “In the industry today,” he wrote presciently to his colleagues, “fakery is replacing puffery . . . a consumer and FDA crackdown is inevitable and damaging to credibility.” He goes further in interviews: “When they make a claim of anti-aging, of the stuff having deep biological effects, then they have to be stopped. It’s pure bunkum . . . beyond the bounds of reason and truth.” And he says that the new products “simply cannot function as their backers and makers say they do, because it is physically impossible for them to get deep enough into the skin to make any lasting difference to wrinkles. The same applies to the removal of lines or wrinkles, or the permanent prevention of the aging of cells.” The hope of anything achieving such effects is, he says, “actually zero.”

  “Some of my colleagues,” Kligman admits, “tell me, ‘Women are so dumb! How can they buy all that grease and stuff? Educated women, who’ve been to Radcliffe and Cambridge and Oxford and the Sorbonne—what gets into them? Why do they go to Bloomingdale’s and pay $250 for that hokum?’”

  Women are “so dumb” because the establishment and its watchdogs share the cosmetics industry’s determination that we are and must remain “so dumb.” The “crackdown” came at last in the United States in 1987—but not from concern for women consumers exploited by a $20-billion-a-year fraud. The first straw was when heart specialist Dr. Christiaan Barnard brought out Glycel (“a fake, a complete fake,” says Dr. Kligman). The doctor’s fame and superoutrageous claims for his product (“This was the first time in history that we can recall a physician putting his name to a cosmetic line,” says Stanley Kohlenberg of Sanofi Beauty Products) provoked envy in the rest of the industry. According to one of Gerald McKnight’s sources: “Somebody put it to the Agency that if they did not act to pull the product off the shelves, the industry would see to it that the FDA’s name was dragged through the mire.” The Food and Drug Administration then went after the industry as a whole “because we were all doing it, making wild claims.” The agency asked twenty-three chief cosmetics executives to account for “claims that they were flagrantly making in magazines, films and every possible area of hype . . . that they had added ‘magical’ anti-aging and cellular replacement ingredients to their products.” The FDA asked for “immediate withdrawal of the claims or submission for testing as drugs.” “We are unaware,” FDA director Daniel L. Michaels wrote to them, “of any substantial scientific evidence that demonstrates the safety and effectiveness of these articles. Nor are we aware that these drugs are generally recognized as safe and effective for their intended uses.” In other words, the agency said, if the creams do what you claim, they are drugs and must be tested. If they don’t, you are making false claims.

  Is all this proof that anyone really cares about an industry whose targets for religious fraud are women? Morris Herstein points out that “the FDA is only saying, ‘Look, we’re concerned about what you’re saying, not what you’re doing.’ It is a dictionary problem, a lexicon problem, a question of vocabulary.” The head of the agency hardly sounds adversarial. “We’re not trying to punish anyone,” he told Deborah Blumenthal, a reporter for The New York Times, in 1988. She believed that the products would stay the same, only the “surrealist nature” of some claims would disappear. Three years later, these “surrealist” claims have re-emerged.

  Think of the enormity: For twenty years the holy oils made “scientific” claims, using bogus charts and figures, of “proven improvement” and “visible difference” that were subject to no outside verification. Outside the United States, the same manufacturers continue to make false claims. In the United Kingdom, almost all holy oil ads ignore the British Code of Advertising warning not to “contain any claim to provide rejuvenation, that is to prevent, retard or reverse the physiological changes and degenerative conditions brought about by, or associated with, increasing age.” The British Department of Trade and Industry finally followed suit in 1989 (as British dermatologist Ronald Marks said, “A lot of this stuff is cosmetic hoo-ha”), but the DTI has not yet committed the time or resources to follow through. In neither country has there been a public move to put pressure on the industry to print retractions or apologies to women; nor in the coverage of the change in regulations has the possibility been raised of financial compensation for the women consumers cheated so thoroughly for so many years.

  Is it an overreaction to take such deception so seriously? Isn’t women’s relation to holy oils as trivial, the pathos of our faith as harmless, even endearing, as it is reflected in popular discourse? Women are poor; poorer than men. What is so important about 20 billion of our dollars a year? It would buy us, trivially enough, each year, roughly three times the amount of day care offered by the U.S. government: or 2,000 women’s health clinics; or 75,000 women’s film, music, literature, or art festivals; or 50 women’s universities; or 1 million highly paid home support workers for the housebound elderly; or 1 million highly paid domestic or child care workers; or 33,000 battered-women’s shelters; or 2 billion tubes of contraceptive cream; or 200,000 vans for late-night safe transport; or 400,000 full four-year university scholarships for young women who cannot afford further education; or 20 million airplane tickets around the world; or 200 million five-course dinners in four-star French restaurants; or 40 million cases of Veuve Clicquot champagne. Women are poor; poor people need luxuries. Of course women should be free to buy whatever they want, but if we are going to spend our hard-earned cash, the luxuries should deliver what they promise, not simply leech guilt money. No one takes this fraud seriously because the alternative to it is the real social threat: that women will first accept their aging, then admire it, and finally enjoy it. Wasting women’s money is the calculable damage; but the damage this fraud does women through its legacy of the dread of aging is incalculable.

  The Food and Drug Administration “crackdown” avoided the possibility that corrupt conditions would change to let women love the signs of their age. The language of the advertisements brilliantly and immediately shifted tone to the level of emotional coercion, each word carefully market-researched. These prose poems about women’s private needs and fears are even more persuasive than the earlier scientific lies. The success of a belief system depends upon how well the religious leaders understand the emotional situation of its targets. Holy oil ads began to take the emotional pulse of their audience with state-of-the-art accuracy.

  Analyzing those ads, we see that women are under terrific stress. Many, though publicly confident, are secretly feeling vulnerable, exhausted, overwhelmed, and besieged. In the new scenario, unseen dangers assault an unprotected female victim:

  “Shielded from . . . environmental irritants. . . . Buffer . . . against the elements. . . . Defense cream.” (Elizabeth Arden) “An invisible barrier between you and environmental irritants. . . . An invisible shield.” (Estée Lauder) “Protective . . . added defense. . . . Protectinol, an effective complex of protective ingredients. . . . Face constant aggressions . . . today’s more polluted environment . . . tiredness, stress . . . environmental aggressions and lifestyle variations.” (Clarins) “Counteract the stresses and strains of today’s lifestyle.” (Almay) “Everyday . . . subject to damaging environmental conditions which together with stress and tiredness affect it adversely and upset its natural balance.” (RoC) “Strengthen . . . natural defenses . . . to counteract daytime environmental stress. . . . A protective barrier against external aggressors.” (Charles of the Ritz) “Shielded from environmental irritants. . . . Buffer . . . against the elements.” (Estée Lauder) “Assaulted by age and ultra-violet exposure. . . . A protective barrier against the chem
ical and physical assaults of the environment . . . your body’s natural defenses. . . . Just in time. Discover your best . . . defense.” (Clientèle) “Cells . . . slough in clumps leaving pockets of vulnerability. . . . Exposure to your daily environment . . . fluorescent lights, overheated offices . . . causes wrinkles. . . . An invisible enemy . . . 70% of women experience invisible eroding effects.” (Orience) “Attacked by external elements . . . external aggressions.” (Orchidea) “Skin defender . . . desensitizing barrier . . . neutralizes environmental irritants . . . before it takes the abuse of another day, protect it. . . . Alleviate years of negative influence.” (Estée Lauder) “Under attack every day of its life . . . an essential barrier . . . helps it to defend itself.” (L’Oréal)

  What is this scenario to which women are so painfully receptive? It is about the unspoken underside of the life of the successful, controlled working woman: about sexual violence and street harassment and a hostile workplace. Each word strikes a nerve of legitimate female fear that has nothing to do with aging or with the qualities of the product. Not only are women new to the public sphere; it is full of unseen dangers.

  Women are under attack every day of our lives from “unseen aggressors”: Studies repeatedly show that at least one woman in six has been raped, and up to 44 percent have suffered attempted rape. We do have “pockets of vulnerability” subjected to assault—vaginas. The extent to which the AIDS virus has infected women is still unknown; we do need “protective barriers”—condoms and diaphragms. In the United States, 21 percent of married women report physical abuse by their mates. One and one-half million American women are assaulted by a partner every year; one British woman in seven is raped by her husband. Women respond to fantasies about protection from assault because we are being assaulted.

  Almost all working women are clustered in twenty low-status job categories; we do have an “invisible enemy”—institutional discrimination. Verbal sexual abuse on city streets is a daily abrasive; women are exposed to “environmental stress.” Women score lower than men on tests to measure self-esteem; we do need to overcome “years of negative influence”—internalized female self-hatred. Almost two out of three marriages in the United States end in divorce, at which women’s standard of living declines by 73 percent while men’s rises by 42 percent; women are “unprotected.” More than 8 million American women raise at least one child alone, of whom only 5 million are awarded child support, of which 47 percent get the full amount, 37 percent less than half, and 28 percent nothing. Women are being “eroded” by “life-style variations.” American women’s 1983 median income was $6,320, while men’s was over twice as much. Between two thirds and three quarters of women have been sexually harassed at work. We do face “environmental irritants.” Overwork and low pay does leave us “stressed” under “fluorescent lights” in “overheated offices.” Women make $.59–$.66 cents for every male dollar. We can buy a holy oil called Equalizer. Vaseline Intensive Care offers, “Finally . . . equal treatment . . . the treatment they deserve.” Just 5 percent of top managers are women. Johnson and Johnson makes Purpose. The Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass in the U.S. Congress; women do need a buffer. Women do need a better defense.

  Holy oils promise the protection that women no longer get from men and do not yet get from the law. They do so at the level of a dream. They offer to be a chador or chastity belt or a husband or an antiradiation suit, depending on the fear evoked, to keep the woman safe in the abrasive male world that many have entered with such flying colors.

  Some of the copy appeals to the ambivalence that women feel about their stressful new roles—or rather, about entering a discriminatory system in which feminism gets the blame for subjecting women to the high stress of a sexist outer world. Many have mixed feelings about the cost of male-defined “success” and time away from children. This is the “post-feminist” school of skin care:

  “[Alleviate] stress . . . surface tension.” (Almay) “Stressed-skin concentrate . . . triumphs in the face of adversity . . . solves the 20th Century Skin Problem.” (Elizabeth Arden) “Stress and tension.” (Biotherm) “Is success taking its toll on your face? . . . your lifestyle exposes you to a hectic pace and lots of stress . . . real assaults on skin (ones our mothers didn’t worry about).” (Orlane) “Takes on the realities of your life. What’s happening to you is happening to your skin . . . for the woman whose lifestyle makes incredible demands.” (Matrix) “The busy, bustling life of modern women means that unfortunately they do not take care of their legs.” (G. M. Collin) “When your skin is acting confused.” (Origins)

  The divorce rate in the United States nearly doubled between 1970 and 1981. Since 1960, the divorce rate has doubled in almost every country in Europe, tripled in the Netherlands, quintupled in the United Kingdom, and has risen tenfold in Barbados; in Bangladesh and Mexico, one woman in ten who has married has been divorced or separated, one in five in Colombia, one in three in Indonesia. Elizabeth Arden’s Eyezone repair gel gives us the last cycle of women’s history in a tube: “The vital supporting structures between the [cells] break down, leaving the skin weakened and vulnerable.” Her Immunage shields one from “rays that weaken skin’s support structure and devastate.” Untreated skin shows “a dramatic lack of cohesion.” Women’s traditional support systems—the family, male financial backing, even the women’s groups of feminism’s second wave—have broken down. Clinique “helps support needy skin. It’s a good cause.” In a rescue fantasy, single or struggling women read that Estée Lauder’s microsomes are “attracted like high-powered magnets [magnates?] to the surface cells that need help most, repairing, reinforcing and rebuilding.” These “support systems” can now be “repaired and rebuilt” by the “dynamic action” that women can get at the pharmacist’s when the nuclear family and the legislature have failed us.

  The code words will change with women’s subconscious anxieties. But if women want out of an expensive belief system arranged to coerce us through these messages, we will read holy oil copy knowing that it is not about the product, but is an impressively accurate portrait of the hidden demons of our time.

  The ads read women’s needs on a very personal level as well. Women, they know, sometimes feel a need to regress and be nurtured. With the Rites of Beauty, women are driven from the present with encouragement to recapture the past. Cults that idealize the past are called revitalization movements—Nazism being one example.

  With both age and weight theology, women have memories of Eden—Timotei shampoo’s “secret garden”—and its loss: As children, all women had “flawless” skin and most were lovingly fed as much as they wanted to eat. The two words whose variants are repeated so often that few ads are free of them are “revitalize” and “nourish.” Almay “gives new life.” RoC “revitalizes”; Auraseva is “revitalizing,” lets one be “reborn.” Clarins uses “revitalize” nine times in a one-fold leaflet. You can be “Reborn” with Elizabeth Arden. And Guerlain gives you Revitenol. Those two words are hypnotically repeated within single ads. “Renewal” recurs twenty-eight times over in a one-page leaflet for a holy oil called Millennium. The millennium heralded by the Second Coming is when the dead will live again; and women will return to their youth, the time when the Rites say they are most alive.

  Women, advertisers know, are feeling undernourished, physically and emotionally. We repress our hunger—to acknowledge it would be a weakness. But our nutritional deficiency shows in holy oil copy that dwells on forbidden richness or sweetness, the honey of the Holy Land, the mother’s milk of Mary: Milk ’n Honee, Milk Plus 6, Estée Lauder Re-Nutriv, Wheat Germ n’ Honey, Max Factor 2000 Calorie Mascara, Skin Food, Creme, Mousse, Caviare. The woman feeds her skin the goodness she cannot take without guilt or conflict into either mouth. In a New York Times article entitled “Food for Thought,” Linda Wells writes that “the latest skin-care ingredients . . . could be mistaken for the menu at a glitzy restaurant”; she lists quail’s eggs, honey, bananas, olive oil, peanuts, cav
iar, sturgeon’s roe, and passion fruit. The hungry woman allows herself only on the outside what she truly desires for the inside.

  In a 1990 survey of three thousand women, fully half felt that “men were only interested in their own sexual satisfaction.” The most “intensive nourishment” is promised by the creams for nighttime, “when your skin is able to absorb more nourishment. This is the time to nurture it . . . [with] special nourishments” (Almay Intensive Nourishing Complex). Nighttime is when such women will most deeply feel the lack of a nurturer. Skin “nourishment” is scientifically impossible, since nothing penetrates the stratum corneum. Women are feeding their skins as a way to feed themselves the love of which many are deprived.

  Women are urged to project onto these products what they want from their relationships with men. The first Hite Report showed that women wanted more tenderness. There is a strain of Christian mysticism, sensual and intimate, in which Christ is a lover who offers the mystic a romantic, pure union. Jesus the bridegroom has been a fantasy mainstay of women. The cosmetic version of God the Son is tender. He knows exactly what the supplicant needs. The oils “calm,” “soothe,” and “comfort”; they offer a “balm,” like Gilead’s, to a “sensitive” and “irritated” skin or self. Judging from the ads, women want more care and attention than they are getting from men (“They never give you any personal attention”—Clinique), as well as a slower hand, an easier touch. The oils “glide on smoothly, like silk.” The genie in the bottle does what real men evidently are not doing enough: He will touch her gently, commit himself forever, empathize and care for her, do for her what women do for men. He comes in a lipstick “you can have a lasting relationship with.” He offers “More Care. Pure Care,” “totally taking care creams,” “Special Care,” “Intensive Care” (Johnson & Johnson), “Loving Care” (Clairol), “Natural Care” (Clarins). He knows her sexual pace, taking “the softly, softly approach,” providing “the kind of loving” the woman has “been thirsting for.” He takes the guilt from sex: She “can be restored to feelings that are purely natural.” He suffereth long, and is Empathy shampoo and Kind cleanser and Caress soap and Plenitude conditioner. Magically, women’s sexual needs are a source of conflict no longer: “Your skin’s sensitive moments need be a problem no more. . . . You need sensitive care all over . . . it’s the body’s most complex organ.” Others offer to “lubricate luxuriously” and to “ensure maximum penetration” and to “respond directly to your needs . . . Special Care . . . when and where you need it.” (“Thou knowest,” the missal prays, “what good things I stand in need of.”) Female sexuality is like that, after all: “Sometimes you need a little Finesse, sometimes you need a lot.”