Chapter Six

Consumers or Consumed?

I

For Owen-Jones, it is easy to see how these political scandals must have seemed like a never-ending, irritating diversion from his main job. These years saw the transformation of L’Oréal from a national treasure into a multinational giant. And from that point of view, the acquisition of Helena Rubinstein did what it had been intended to do. Corrèze and all he stood for represented a regrettable past. But the Helena Rubinstein deal represented the future. In 1988, when O-J assumed the chief executive’s chair, the company was still a French hair-care group; when he stepped down in 2006, it was the biggest cosmetics business in the world, and readying itself to expand still further, into India, China, Brazil, and Russia. In such a context, recollections of ancient misdeeds receded into insignificance. “Not that old story,” the family would sigh wearily whenever the old scandals resurfaced. The years, they implied, should have drawn the sting from that tale—and this hope, clearly, was shared by Owen-Jones.

But, on the contrary, the scandals remain relevant precisely because L’Oréal has become so large and powerful. The bigger the enterprise, after all, the bigger its capacity to bully. Huge multinational enterprises, with their enormous budgets and their ability to bestow or remove patronage, in the form of jobs or investment, hold more real clout than many nation-states. Their acts, therefore, take on a moral and political significance over and above the commercial. And L’Oréal is among them—number 346 in Fortune’s list of the world’s 500 largest companies, with revenues in 2008 of nearly $26 billion. It is true that L’Oréal does not operate in such obviously edgy areas as power generation or banking. But the company’s huge advertising outlay gives it immense influence over what we read in newspapers and magazines and watch on television. That advertising not only molds our sense of what we want to look like and who we want to be—in a very real sense, our perception of who we are—but also, as an essential source of revenue, enables the company to discourage unwelcome content in the media where it buys space.1 Yet at the same time, as the Rosenfelder case shows, the company remains—as a commercial and not a political entity—politically unaccountable.

L’Oréal’s founder would have been very much at home in this world where business and politics are inseparably twinned. Not that Eugène Schueller saw his company as a source of political power in itself. Rather it was a guinea pig upon which to test out his theories and a provider of funds with which, subsequently, to buy the power to implement them. But in practice—and especially in France, where there has long existed a seamless interface between commerce and politics—such separations are almost meaningless. In Britain, where political power has traditionally been a perquisite of land ownership, the time-honored muckraking format is Who Owns Britain? with three books of (more or less) that title, by different authors, published between 1944 and 2001.1 The same is true in America, where wealth has always ruled, and where four Who Owns America? books have been published since 1936.2 But in France, the equivalent books—Les 200 familles, Le Retour des 200 familles, Les Nouvelles 200 familles, Les Bonnes fréquentations—are all about social networks. President Pompidou worked at the Rothschild bank and had numerous connections in the social and business worlds; Marcel Dassault, the aeronautical industrialist, was a member of the Assemblée Nationale; André Bettencourt was a senator and a member of successive governments, as well as being vice president of one of France’s biggest companies.

By comparison with these far-reaching tentacles, Helena Rubinstein’s concerns seem quaintly parochial. Never interested in political power, her extracommercial interests were solely personal and familial. And although she and Schueller were of the same generation, and set up shop within a few years of each other, this comparatively limited worldview meant that by the time of the takeover, his company represented the future, hers, the past.

Although the conjunction of the barber’s hair-dye commission and Schueller’s particular talents was undoubtedly fortuitous, it is clear that his combination of intellectual ability, obsession, and business acumen would have taken him to the top in whatever field he chose. For him, the vital factor was education. Once educated, he became unstoppable, able both to produce new products at the laboratory bench and to evolve a management philosophy that, like its inventor, could succeed in any industry.

Helena Rubinstein’s success was far narrower, and was based almost wholly on her phenomenal talent for trading. Patrick O’Higgins once accompanied her on an afternoon’s shopping in Paris. They started by visiting the painter Kees van Dongen, where she bought a canvas for $2,000 less than the price quoted by the artist, distracting Madame Kees van Dongen (who did the selling) at the crucial moment by observing that her skin was dry and promising to send her some products. They then continued on to Cartier’s, who had developed a new double lipstick container that interested her, and which she acquired, after playing the manager like a hooked fish, for 700,000 francs ($14,000) rather than the official price of 800,000. The painting was sold, after her death, for three times what she paid; the lipstick case was “adapted” with great success, and as “Nite ’n Day” sold more than a million, at three dollars each. Nor was her interest limited to large sums. As a business associate observed, “If someone offered Helena Rubinstein a package of gum for a nickel she would say ‘too much’ in the hope that it was the only package of gum in the world that could be bought for four cents.”3

Rubinstein’s drive and marketing ability were so far above the ordinary that they enabled her to overcome both her lack of education and the social and commercial obstacles that confronted all would-be businesswomen. But even with all her business talents, she made it big only because her face cream hit at a crucial moment in social history.

Quite how fundamental this was may be seen in the very different fate of an equally determined Jewish entrepreneuse who tried to open a beauty salon in London’s Bond Street forty years before Helena Rubinstein, and whose business, despite its great commercial success, crashed in humiliation and bankruptcy.

Mrs. Rachel Leverson, trading as Madame Rachel under the banner “Beautiful For Ever!” opened her salon in 1865. She sold the usual range of lotions, creams, powders, and paints, and did well. Within a few months of her salon’s opening, she and her many daughters moved from the distant suburb of Blackheath to a fine house in Maddox Street, just around the corner from her shop, filled it with expensive furniture, and rented a pit-tier box at the opera, at £400 a season.

In the summer of 1868, Madame Rachel was sued for fraud and conspiracy by a middle-aged widow, a Mrs. Borradaile. Madame Rachel had sold Mrs. Borradaile a number of pricey products—cosmetics, a course of bran baths—promising that they would make her beautiful again and would enable her to catch a new husband in the person of Lord Ranelagh (whose role in all this remained unclear: he was a well-known and notoriously disreputable man-about-town). Mrs. Borradaile spent all she had on these treatments, and the results were not as promised. So she sued.

The case against Madame Rachel held little legal water. Admittedly, Mrs. Borradaile, stringy, middle-aged, with dyed yellow hair, had not become beautiful. Lord Ranelagh had not married her. And the sums charged by Madame Rachel—it was rumored £1,000 for the bran baths (around £62,000, or over $100,000, in current value)—were large. But nobody had forced the plaintiff to buy these products, and Madame Rachel had delivered what she had promised: namely, a course of baths. When the jury, after hearing much strange and muddled evidence, failed to agree on a verdict, the Times found its failure to acquit “only comprehensible on the supposition that they failed to see on which side the burden of proof lay.”4 Under English law Madame Rachel did not have to prove herself innocent. Mrs. Borradaile had to prove her guilty beyond all reasonable doubt, which she had failed to do.

That should have been that: case dismissed. But the prosecution appealed for a retrial, the judge allowed it, and this time the jury duly convicted. Madame Rachel, who had been denied bail while waiting for the retrial, was sentenced to an unusually harsh five years’ hard labor; and the Times, despite its earlier pronouncement, applauded. “Whatever may be the differences of opinion about the prisoner’s legal guilt, about her moral guilt we take it there can be no doubt whatever,” it thundered—thus dismissing, in one sentence, the entire basis of the British legal system.

What was it about Madame Rachel that so rattled the British establishment? The prosecution made much of her Jewishness—but it was no crime to be Jewish in Victorian England: the prime minister in 1868 was the not-very-Protestant Benjamin Disraeli. There were hints of various unsavory doings: that the baths were taken in a room fitted up for voyeurs, that Mrs. Leverson’s promise to “cleanse the system from many of its impurities” was code for performing abortions, whose providers often called themselves “Madame.” But none of this hearsay was under scrutiny. That the real problem was the beauty salon was made clear by the prosecutor’s declaration that he “wished all the ladies who had heard or read this case would learn that if once they crossed the threshold of such places they would come out with a taint upon them.”5 That was an extraordinary phrase. Men in nineteenth-century Britain clearly found the use of cosmetics highly threatening.

If asked to justify this attitude, the Times editorial writer would doubtless have taken his stand, as Victorian gentlemen did, on the Bible, where Saint Paul recommended that women should cover their hair—their “crowning glory”—while a man should not cover his, because “he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.”6 In Victorian Britain as in Pauline Judea, women were second-class beings, inferior in the sight of God, and as soon as they married, the property of their husbands, who alone were entitled to enjoy their good looks. And Victorian men, like Saint Paul, further assumed that the only reason a woman might want to look good in public—and thus the only point of cosmetics—was to seem more attractive to the opposite sex: if unmarried, to catch a husband (in the words of a 1770 British law banning it, makeup was for “seducing men into matrimony by cosmetic means”); if married, to carry on adulterous flirtations.

This (invariably male) assumption still persists, as does the misogyny that informs it. In 2005, Zoo Weekly, a British men’s magazine, ran a “Win a boob job for your partner” competition, offering all-expenses-paid breast implant surgery as a prize to the girl “who deserves it most.” The magazine called for men, or their girlfriends, to send in shots of the woman’s cleavage, to be voted on by readers. When BBC Radio 1 asked its listeners what they thought about this, some women objected that they found the idea of such a competition degrading. But this elicited aggressive replies from competition entrants. “Woah! Woah! Woah! Too much ‘Girl Power’ in here,” ranted one. “Calm down, girls! I entered the competition not because I wanted to give my girlfriend a gift, if she wants bigger boobs she can pay for them herself. . . . Its [sic] not always about you girls. High horse . . . climb down off of.”

Victorian England, Pauline Judea, and the readers of Zoo could hardly be more different. But they are all disturbed by the same idea: that women might choose to be something more than a support system for men. For them, the worrying thing about cosmetics is the inescapable sense that women do not wear them with men in mind, but on the contrary, for their own benefit. Just as on a bad hair day nothing will go right, so looking good is always a confidence booster. And self-confidence leads to self-assertion.

This was certainly Helena Rubinstein’s view. One of her nieces once asked her what use cosmetics were in meeting people’s real needs. Rubinstein replied: “If my products help one young worker feel better about herself that day, then I feel I have accomplished something worthwhile.”7 And making people feel better about themselves still remains the primary function of cosmetics and (more recently) cosmetic surgery. In a survey of 1,000 British women conducted in 2005 by the women’s magazine Grazia, only 13 percent of those considering cosmetic surgery said they were doing so because they wanted to look more attractive to men, while 64 percent thought it would give them more confidence.8 That confidence would of course help should they wish to attract a man. But it would also help them function without one.

Powder and paint, when worn by respectable women, were thus intolerable to the Victorians on two fronts. First, they bolstered the self-esteem of a class of persons supposed to be meek and subordinate; second, they represented a highly visible form of rebellion, an incontrovertible and unmissable statement that the wearer valued her personal satisfaction above the wishes of her husband. One might turn a blind eye to the receipt of a discreet parcel of beauty aids, or the digging-out of Grandma’s recipe for rosy cheeks (though such activities were always noticed and remarked on: Mrs. X powders, Mrs. Y rouges.) But visiting a beauty salon too openly defied social taboos. As for running one, that was too much. It had to be stopped, and stopped it was.

Forty years later, however, the daughters of those Victorian wives had become lipsticked suffrage marchers who, as everyone knew, would sooner rather than later have their way. And Helena Rubinstein, rich, independent, self-made, eye-poppingly chic, and sheathed in a seamless shell of creams, powders, and paints, both offered an image of what was possible and provided the means of getting there—or at least of taking a step along the way.

The problem, however, with products that are of a particular moment is that they tend to date. Economically, today’s women have never been freer. In that sense we are still living in Rubinstein’s world. But cosmetics have moved on dramatically since Madame, in her heyday, was the constantly visible face of Helena Rubinstein. It was Eugène Schueller’s scientific laboratory, not Helena Rubinstein’s kitchen, that would hold the key to the cosmetics future.

II

During the twentieth century, dreams that had for centuries been the stuff of fairy tales one after another became reality. Airplanes gave us magic carpets; automobiles, seven-league boots. The telephone let us speak across continents; radio and television showed us all that was happening in the world, often at the moment it happened. Most recently, the Internet has granted us instant, universal knowledge. And although immortality is still beyond us, the beauty business offers a consolation prize. What (Freud famously inquired) do women want? Madame Rachel could have told him: to be beautiful forever. And today, beautiful forever is, up to a point, ours. When, in 1935, a reader wrote to the author of Skin Deep inquiring about Helena Rubinstein’s “Herbal Tissue” cream, retailing at $1.25 and supposed to “prevent or heal lines, crepy eyelids and crows around the eyes,”9 the answer was: “There is, alas, no cosmetic known capable of doing the things described.” Today, however, that is no longer true.

Skin creams are still most people’s first line of defense. And these days, they can have some slight effect. In April 2007, research carried out for the BBC television program Horizon, investigating the antiaging industry, found that although most creams left wrinkles wholly unsmoothed, one did, over time, make a slight, but measurable, difference: No. 7 Protect and Perfect Serum, a proprietary brand of the British pharmacy chain Boots, and at £16.75 ($27) for a 30ml jar, one of the cheapest products in the survey. Within twenty-four hours of the program being broadcast, sales jumped 2,000 percent. Customers queued outside branches of Boots at five the next morning. In Yorkshire, there was a near-riot when one woman bought a store’s entire stock. Within two weeks what had been a year’s supply of the lotion was bought up, and single jars sold on eBay for up to £100. Today, in time-honored style, the Protect and Perfect family has expanded to include day cream, night cream, beauty serum, intense beauty serum, and a range of products for men. Why stop at one product when twelve will do?

The secret of Boots’ cream is a vitamin A compound called retinol, which increases the production of two important components of the skin, glycosaminoglycan and procollagen. Creams today also use hyaluronic acid, or hyaluronan, a component of connective tissue that cushions and lubricates, and their advertising heavily emphasizes scientific certainty. Thus, L’Oréal’s Youth Code skin cream is “Inspired by the Science of Genes.” But the scientifically active ingredients in such creams, although present, are a vanishingly small proportion of the whole—far less than the quantity required to produce any noticeable effect. As Liz Walker, proprietor of the House of Beauty in Barnsley, Yorkshire, put it, “A pampering facial or a nice cream is all very well, but it’s not going to make those wrinkles completely disappear, is it?”10

If the cream doesn’t do the trick, however, new and effective resources are now available. We can either go deeper, with plastic surgery, or iron out wrinkles with “cosmoceuticals.” In 2006, the number of cosmetic procedures, both surgical and noninvasive, was estimated at well over 21 million worldwide. By 2015, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons expects its members to carry out 55 million such procedures annually in the United States alone.11 The market, valued at nearly $14 billion in 2007, is growing at $1 billion a year.12 On-demand shape-shifting has become one of the passions of the new millennium.

Plastic surgery is not new. As long ago as 2000 B.C., doctors in India repaired noses disfigured by disease or punishment. But until antiseptics and anesthesia made operations relatively painless and safe, it was used only in extreme cases. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, it gained ground: plastic surgery was one of the treatments Helena Rubinstein investigated on her whirlwind tour of European skin specialists in 1905, along with chemical skin peels and other such scientific innovations. But these treatments were expensive and often risky. In 1921, the American heiress Gladys Deacon, whom the press dubbed the world’s loveliest woman, and who was certainly one of the richest, had paraffin wax injected into her face to correct a small indentation at the bridge of her nose. She hoped to achieve the profile of a Greek statue, but unfortunately for her the wax slipped, leaving her with an incipient horn on her forehead and a swollen neck where the wax had run down under the skin. It was a catastrophe from which neither she nor paraffin-wax treatments ever recovered.

As so often, military requirements nudged the science forward. Wars destroy many faces, and doctors such as Jacques Joseph in Germany during World War I and Archibald McIndoe in Britain during World War II were both made famous by their pioneering techniques in reconstructive surgery. Inevitably, these were soon co-opted by the beauty business. After World War I, another pioneering plastic surgeon, Sir Harold Gillies, wondered if it might be possible to make a living out of private plastic surgery. The answer, as he soon found, was yes. He neatly summed up the difference between his new field and his old: “Reconstructive surgery is an attempt to return to normal; cosmetic surgery is an attempt to surpass the normal.”13 But while comparatively few people, at least in peacetime, need reconstructive surgery, almost everybody would like to look better than they do, and many are happy to pay for the privilege.

Today, surpassing the normal has become so run-of-the-mill that to age unretouched seems almost a form of obstinacy. The website of one London cosmetic-surgery practice offers a body map: click on the appropriate part to choose your preferred procedure. Face, ears, arms, hands, breasts, abdomen, genitalia, hips, legs, skin—all can be altered, and, hopefully, improved. You can indulge in medical tourism: see Prague (or Warsaw, or Rio) and get your tummy tucked while you’re there. The New York Times even published a restaurant-type guide to Rio doctors, giving prices, specialties, booking advice, and handy hints: “Dr. Müller is known for, among other things, sculpturing beautifully shaped breasts and performing body liposuction. If you’re looking for an aggressive makeover this is not the place for you: Dr. Müller specializes in the natural look. . . .”14 Doctors tout themselves online, publishing testimonials from grateful patients and employing media consultants to promote their public image—not only in America, where this kind of thing has always been allowed, but in Britain, where it very much has not. An old-school plastic and cosmetic surgeon I spoke to—he didn’t want to be named, I’ll call him Peter—thought advertising for cosmetic surgery “the pits: you used to get struck off by the General Medical Council for that kind of thing.” However, even where there is a prohibition, doctors get around it: all they need do is belong to a clinic, which does the advertising for them.

So fundamental, indeed, has body altering become to our lives, and so fascinating are the possibilities, that watching it in action has become a component of prime-time television. In programs such as Extreme Makeover, Nip/Tuck, and Ten Years Younger, unreconstructed subjects undergo transformation by a team of experts—the dentist, the hairdresser, the boob man, the nose man, the stylist-cum-cheerleader—into another person altogether. The original subject—the clay, so to speak—exists only as raw material: the Before. The wizards do their stuff, and—shazam!—a new woman or man is born, all their own work. Pygmalion and Frankenstein live!

I asked Peter if he felt like a sculptor when remolding people’s faces and bodies. He said he did. A lot of his colleagues, he said, are (as he is) painters or sculptors in their spare time—that was often what first attracted them to this branch of surgery. Indeed, he feels artistic skills so necessary to plastic surgeons that he set up a course called “Sculpture for Surgeons.” In it, seven or eight plastic surgeons are given a ball of clay and told to model the head of a sitter—something they do not, at first, find easy even though, or perhaps because, they are so familiar with facial anatomy. One typical participant produced, in the words of Luke Shepherd, the sculptor who teaches the course, “what turned out to be an anatomical model, very hollow-looking, more like a skull. He said he didn’t know how to fill in the soft tissue around the bone structure.” That is, the shape of the end of the nose, or the eyelids—the details, in fact, that concern potential patients. “We try to give them a basic grounding in the language of form—what symmetry is, how the eye balances things,” Shepherd said. “It’s training the eye to ask questions of the form so when they come to surgery the eye is able to make those sort of decisions.” He aims to teach the surgeons on his course to “see 3-D.” It is also important that they see each patient as an individual problem. Plastic surgeons get known for a particular specialty, but with facial work this specialization can be dangerous: patients don’t want a “signature” job, they want the nose, or chin, they themselves feel they need.

Plastic surgery is still not cheap. But easy terms are available, and the customers are happy to pay up. Fifty-four percent of the interviewees in the Grazia survey intended to have cosmetic surgery, expecting to spend on average $5,650 (£3,500). If they didn’t have the necessary money available, they were happy to spend less on clothes and going out. If necessary they would take out a loan—many practices offer low-interest financing to their customers. And the market is not confined to women: a 2007 survey by the market-reseach organization YouGov found that a quarter of all men in the United Kingdom. would consider cosmetic intervention.

However, the great majority of cosmetic procedures these days do not involve surgery. On the contrary, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons predicts that 88 percent of the 55 million procedures anticipated in 2015 will be noninvasive. “You can do a lot of things with a needle now—you can compete with a knife,” said Dr. Lucy Glancey, a specialist in cosmetic and antiaging treatments.15 You can either plump out your face with collagen fillers, “redistributing volume,” as Dr. Glancey put it, so that firmness returns without the deadly “windswept” look that can result from a face-lift; or you can simply smooth those wrinkles away with Botox, the registered name for an injectable solution of the botulinum toxin, which blocks the signals telling your muscles to contract. If you eat meat containing this poison, it attacks the muscles in your chest: you can’t breathe and it kills you. But if a small amount is injected into your face, the facial muscles can’t move—and so, can’t wrinkle.

First used medicinally in the 1970s to relieve uncontrollable muscle spasms, Botox’s possible cosmetic application was first recognized in 1987. Since then, its popularity has increased exponentially. In 2000, about 800,000 Americans had Botox injections, while nearly 2 million had cosmetic surgery; in 2008, 5.5 million chose Botox (one in eleven of whom were men), and 1.7 million surgery. L’Oréal, already part of the injectables market through its part ownership of the pharmaceuticals firm Sanofi-Aventis and its share of Galderma, a joint venture with Nestlé, in 2009 introduced its own botulinum toxin treatment, to be marketed under the name Azzalure in Europe, and Reloxin in the States. The market for these treatments, worth $1.2 billion in 2009, is expected to grow by 13 percent per year between 2009 and 2012—a tempting prospect, especially given that both 2008 and 2009 saw L’Oréal’s profits fall: in 2008 by 27 percent, in 2009 by a further 3.2 percent.

Injections of Botox (as the treatment has become generically known, though in fact the name is a proprietary trademark owned by Allergan) are quick and virtually painless. The effects are almost instantaneous and involve no ugly scarring. And if you don’t like the result, no problem: it wears off. Since it works because of its paralyzing effect, it makes your face less mobile, producing a curious masklike look. But some users actively prefer this. Just as in eighteenth-century France, the cosmetic mask represents something so desirable—membership in the king’s set, the defeat of time—that its very artificiality becomes a mark of status. “As the Botox wears off towards the end of three months, the movement returns to my face and I get really impatient for my next fix,” said Jay Nicholls, a thirty-two-year-old model and dancer.16 Jay has her Botox renewed every three months at £500 (about $700) a time. That’s the financial equivalent of a face-lift every two years, on and on, into the foreseeable future.

Fillers are more dubious—or that, at any rate, is Peter’s view. In fact, he thought they could sometimes be quite dangerous. Gladys Deacon–type disasters are by no means inconceivable even now. The “trout pout” that can result from having your lips plumped is a notorious risk. But, as with Botox, these treatments are not permanent, and since they are both cheaper, per treatment, than surgery, as well as far less time-consuming and daunting, more and more people want to try them. “Supermarket workers, dinner ladies, they’re all saving up for [Botox],” says Liz Walker. “And there are no holds barred as to how far they’ll go for all the other stuff, either. We’re now using machines they don’t even use in London in order to get more immediate results.”

I asked Dr. Glancey if she had tried out her own treatments. She admitted that she had: several of them, in fact. “We’re in a sweetie shop here—you can’t resist,” she said. And it’s easy to see what she means. Once you take the first step—iron out your frown lines, whiten your teeth, plump out your cheeks or the backs of your hands—your body becomes a blank sheet. What about those crow’s-feet, those baggy upper arms . . . ? If something goes wrong, perhaps some further tweaking may improve it. Once you begin, the possibilities for discontent are infinite, perfection always somewhere around the next corner. And soon, in the excitement of redesign, you’ve forgotten what you looked like in the first place. Before-and-after photographs of surgery addicts show a terrifying disjunction between the presurgery face and the end result of serial adjustments. “Most surgeons have to convince people to have less,” said Luke Shepherd.

For some, the procedure rather than the result is the important thing. In an extreme form, this pattern can be pathological: the feeling of constant discontent with one’s body, and compulsion to change it, is a syndrome known as body dysmorphic disorder. But even for nondysmorphics, cosmetic procedures can be addictive. “I’m here for a wound check to make sure I’m healing properly,” Lauren, forty-five, said as she waited for her appointment at a large London practice.

I had a tummy tuck, had my implants changed and I had a breast uplift. I had my first breast implants done 17 years ago after I had my son. My boobs went from a C to an A and I thought, “I don’t like that, they look like pita breads.” I was considering having a tummy tuck so I thought while I’m there I might as well have my breasts done.17

Mostly, though, the treatments are a means to an end: feeling better about yourself. “I have completely re-invented myself and Botox has played a big part in that,” said Lisa, thirty-seven, while Victoria, a widow, age forty-five, said Botox “has given me the confidence to restart my life after [my husband’s] death.”18

Workplace issues are also important. Particularly when times are hard, people feel that if they begin to look old they may lose their job to someone younger. When the beauty business began, this fear was not a woman’s concern, as men were the principal wage earners and most women’s chief preoccupation was to catch a husband—as in a typical L’Oréal ad from 1923, which showed a pretty girl sitting between two admirers: “The young are life’s favorites. . . . Gray hairs don’t attract admiring looks. And happy youth lasts longer for those who use L’Oréal.”

But priorities soon changed—and the letters written by readers to the author of Skin Deep in 1935 and 1936, during the Depression, pinpoint the moment. These women’s principal worry was no longer that they would fail to catch a man, but that they might lose their job. Their earnings, formerly, like their bright-red lipstick, a badge of newly gained freedom and independence, had become a vital part of the family budget; and cosmetics and hair dye (once carefree banners for emancipation) were now essential tools in the grim fight for employment. In those circumstances, cosmetics played a vital role—whether by preserving the illusion of youth, so that an employer would be less inclined to “let you go,” or because the wearer felt—and so worked—better. Skin Deep’s researches revealed that all the synthetic hair dyes on the market in America during the 1930s were more or less allergenic, some seriously so; but the ensuing correspondence made it clear that many women felt they had to risk them, or else face unemployment. “Due to the fact that my hair is prematurely grey, and even more important, that if such a fact were known it would jeopardize my job, I have in desperation and with much fear and trembling been using Inecto Hair Dye,” confessed a worried reader in 1935. Inecto had been found to cause acute dermatitis of the face, inflammation and irritation of the scalp, face, and nose, dermatitis of the scalp, sores on scalp and face, swelling of the eyelids and closing of the eyes, and “many other unpleasant consequences, including toxic absorption extending down over the face, back and arms, followed by acute nephritis, Bright’s disease and anaemia.”19 Another wanted to know “if there is certain proof of injury to persons who have used Grayban for a long period. My work makes it important that I look as well as possible, and gray hair is not flattering to me, as many try to make me fancy.”20 Grayban was based on a salt of bismuth, and poisonous when absorbed. But many users would tolerate any discomfort to avoid being sacked.

Similar fears resurfaced in the economic crisis year of 2008. As always in a time of recession, the beauty business boomed. In America, a total of 12.1 million cosmetic procedures took place—despite the recession, a 3-percent increase over the preceding year. People were, however, less inclined to go for pure “bling”: Dr. Richard Baxter, a plastic surgeon in Washington State, noticed a marked decrease in the size of breast implants as the economy started to go downhill. Before the recession, fewer than a third of his clients chose a B cup implant; after, about half picked a B. “People have turned to more natural-looking things,” he said.21 But men as well as women now turned to the beauty industry in hopes that it might make them seem more desirable to employers. In 2008’s first quarter, one big U.K. cosmetic group reported a 17-percent rise in male face-lifts, while over 5,200 men consulted for other youth-enhancing procedures.22 In the last three months of that same year, a time when thousands of workers in financial institutions lost their jobs, there was a 10-percent rise in face-lifts for men countrywide as sacked bankers used their severance packages to buy plastic surgery.23 “There was this notion in the City [of London] where the older partners felt threatened by the younger partners,” said Dr. Glancey (who also saw a marked increase in the number of men coming to her for treatment). “They didn’t want to look too tired. That tells everyone you’re not going to be as good as a young person. If your face doesn’t give that message then perhaps they’ll forget how old you really are.”

Naturally this becomes even edgier if everyone else in the office has had the signs of advancing years removed. It’s a classic example of positive feedback: once your competitors have had “work done,” the notion of what’s acceptable changes, and you’re obliged to go down the same route merely in order to stay in the game.

For as youth increasingly becomes a necessary qualification for success, aging, even for the happily partnered and employed, has become frightening and unacceptable. “I’m not alone in thinking the idea of being 50 is an absolute outrage,” confessed journalist Christa D’Souza. “If you were to look at [my] photograph and tell me you see an attractive middle-aged woman (for that technically is what I am at 46) I’d not be merely insulted, I’d feel, on some level, that I had failed.”24 But at what? At holding back age itself? Does looking younger make people feel younger? It is true that as longevity increases, forty will genuinely become, as we’re constantly told, the new thirty. In 2000, the average German was 39.9 years old and could expect to live another 39.2 years; middle age could therefore be said to occur at age 40. But by 2050, the average German will be 51.9 years old and will live, on average, another 37.1 years, pushing middle age back five years.25

Face-lifts, then, may help reconcile people not only to the inevitability of getting older, but of being old longer. Writer Linda Brown said that when she first had her face-lift she felt her face no longer really belonged to her—it was simply “the face.” “I wanted me back,” she said. “I couldn’t reconcile myself to the woman in the mirror—I just couldn’t relate to this woman at all.” That is easy to imagine, for we have all met that woman, and she is oddly unnerving: neither old nor young but rather, indefinably, outside age. Hers is the face of cosmetic surgery, the face of our times. And however familiar on others, to meet it in the mirror must inevitably be an odd experience. As the weeks passed, though, Brown got accustomed to it. “I now look like ‘me.’ I don’t care about the red marks, I think for the first time in my life I don’t have to compensate.”26

I can personally attest to the irresistible allure of cosmetic surgery. I was brought up to assume that one made the best of what one had been given: in my case, large breasts. I’ve always hated them, but the thought of doing anything about them (other than wearing a good bra) never seriously crossed my mind. Perhaps that was stupid: Peter the surgeon thinks breast operations almost always leave the woman much happier than before. But my bikini-wearing days are over, nor do I any longer lust after strapless or spaghetti-strap dresses. It seemed inconceivable I would ever consider such an operation now.

In a spirit of inquiry, however, and for the purposes of this book, I arranged a consultation with one of the cosmetic-surgery practices whose ads, plastered throughout the London transport system, encourage travelers to “Shape up for summer!” Adorned with photos of improbably self-supporting cleavage, the advertisers imply that buying new breasts is no more problematic or significant (though a little more expensive) than buying a new swimsuit. The ad gave a phone number and urged tube-riders to call for a free consultation. So I did.

The practice was located in London’s Harley Street, the traditional address of Britain’s grander doctors, and one of the planet’s most expensive parcels of real estate. A quick trawl through the Internet revealed at least thirty-two different plastic-surgery clinics and practitioners located there, and even more in the surrounding streets. Presumably Harley Street’s aura of oak-aged respectability offers a counterweight to cosmetic surgery’s still somewhat tacky image, compounded of dubious outcomes, tasteless advertising (one such ad, urging customers to “Make Yourself Amazing,” offers £750 off breast augmentations if they take a late booking and fill a vacant slot), medical tourism, and easy finance.

The group with which I had my appointment started out twenty years ago with one clinic. Now it has sixteen nationwide. In the waiting area, which takes up the entire ground floor, every seat was occupied, with a six-deep queue at reception. Most of the patients were women, though there were a couple of young men. (In fact, I was told, 40 percent of this group’s clientele is now male.) Many of those waiting were clearly habitués, in for a quick touch-up: “Vicky, you know your way downstairs—thank you, honey,” the receptionist trilled. I had never met her, and was there to discuss what is in fact quite a serious operation, but I, too, was unhesitatingly greeted by my first name: “Hallo, Ruth.”

When I got to see the nurse I was quite open about my reason for being there, and assured her there was little chance I would actually have the operation. But we agreed that she would nonetheless take me through the consultation as though I were one of her more usual customers—who generally, once they’ve saved up the money, can’t wait to get it done. The booklet she gave me to take away urged patients to “take a period of 7–14 days to consider,” which must mean that many don’t. We began with pictures—befores and afters—and then the nurse explained what the procedures would be, and the costs. With one night in hospital, a breast reduction would cost me £5,720 ($9,180), with two nights, £5,990 ($9,600), plus another £300 ($480) for a subsequent necessary injection. That is serious money, for which I have other uses. But as we went on, and against all expectation, I found myself wondering whether, perhaps, I mightn’t have the operation after all. Was it too late, even now, to release my inner Venus de Milo? If I’d still been in the spaghetti-strap market, I’d almost certainly have done it.

Vanity, vanity. But research shows that this desire to attain something nearer one’s ideal physical self is more than that. Our preference for attractive people over plain ones is hardwired. When newborn infants as young as one day old are shown pairs of photographed faces, one judged attractive by adult subjects, one judged plain by the same subjects, the babies spend more time looking at the attractive face.27 Such innate preferences must affect how others judge us, yet until now we have never been able permanently to alter our less attractive physical characteristics.

Which would seem to imply that the real gift is agency: the fact that we are now able to take the necessary action. A 1995 study of cosmetic surgery included one woman whose breast augmentation went disastrously wrong, leading to multiple correctional operations and scarring. But she was still pleased she had had the procedure done. Before it she had seen life as a downward spiral over which she had no control; after, she felt determined to keep going.28 Next time, it would turn out better. In our age of infinite choice, a new and better possibility is always available, in bodies as in everything else. And there can always be a next time. And another. And another. . .

III

But if new bodies, and new faces, are available off the rack, how will we choose which to select? Who sets the fashionable ideal?

The answer is: some enviable, powerful other. The look of the eighteenth-century French court, for example, was not only clownish but dangerous. Everyone knew that the skin-whitening paste called ceruse, made from lead, was a deadly poison that ruined the skin it covered and could cause death. But the king painted his face in this way; and rather than risk losing their social position by appearing outlandishly unpainted, members of the court made themselves up to match.

More recently the choice has often been a matter of race. Sometimes, as with those who sought urgent nose jobs in Nazi Germany, “passing” can be a matter of life and death. More often people simply want to look like the majority, because that majority holds the social and economic power. “Trying to succeed in a white world is very, very difficult,” said Sami, a young Malaysian man living in Britain. “It’s hard enough if you’re white—but even harder if you’re black.” Sami was about to spend 40,000 euros on a leg-lengthening operation because he felt his present height—5’2”, nothing unusual in Malaysia, where the average male height is 5’4”—made it impossible to be taken seriously in a society where the average man is 5’9” tall. And from mere practicality—aping the looks of the powerful because that will make life easier—it is a short step to finding those looks aesthetically preferable.

It is thus not surprising, though still depressing, that America’s first black self-made millionaire, Sarah Breedlove, aka Madam C. J. Walker, made her money by developing hair-straightening products such as the hot comb. “Hair pressing was a ritual of black women’s culture of intimacy,” wrote the black author and historian bell hooks. “It was a world where the images constructed as barriers between one’s self and the world were briefly let go. . . . I was overjoyed when mama finally agreed I could join the Saturday ritual.” Later, hooks abandoned straightened hair, wearing her “natural” as a political declaration. But “For years I still considered it a problem. . . . It has been only in recent years that I have ceased to worry about what other people would say about my hair.”29 Similarly, flat-chested Asian girls living in Caucasian societies seek breast enlargements to conform to the white notion of what is beautiful, while big-bosomed black women seek reductions for the same reason.

Recently, L’Oréal has used two nonwhite women as its “face”: singer Beyoncé Knowles and Freida Pinto, who starred in the film Slumdog Millionaire. In both cases, however, the pictures used in the ads showed them paler than in real life. When a storm of protest was raised by the sudden lightening of Beyoncé, L’Oréal said it was “categorically untrue that L’Oréal Paris altered Ms. Knowles’s features or skin tone in the campaign.” But the fact remained: the image they used was lighter than any other photo of Beyoncé. If L’Oréal Paris had not done the alteration, someone most certainly had. Presumably it was thought the main customer-base was not yet ready to emulate anyone more than slightly coffee-colored.2

Above and beyond the thorny issue of race, however, the lightening of Beyoncé raises interesting questions. They concern the relations between photography and the beauty industry; for not only do the age of mass cosmetics and the age of universal photography coincide, they are inextricably intertwined. Powerful new technologies inevitably affect our perceptions. The arrival of the gramophone changed the way we listened to music. And in the same way, the arrival of photography revolutionized the way we visualized ourselves. For the first time in history, we could obtain, at any moment, a record of ourselves as others saw us—and use that image to experiment with ways of improving what they saw. From then on, the camera dictated the way we wanted to look. And despite the camera’s deceptive instantaneity, that look was always far from nature.

Photography has always been an art as much as a recording device. Because the earliest photographic films were more sensitive to blues than reds, and so didn’t properly register flesh-tones, the detail of early portraits had to be manually adjusted after the event. And when both films and cameras became more efficient, a new problem arose. The super-sharp images were wonderful for landscapes and buildings, and also for portraits when the intention was documentary, as in pictures of relentlessly weathered Native American braves or aging, bewhiskered prime ministers. But a pitiless record of every pore was not what a lady required. Often, therefore, photographers inserted a kindly blurring, softening the focus until blemishes were obscured in a gentle fuzz. After the small photographs known as cartes-de-visite became de rigueur in the 1860s, every woman visualized herself as she might be when posed in soft focus against a studio background.

It was this photo-face, painstakingly smoothed and prepared, that Helena Rubinstein presented to her customers, both in her advertisements and in all the other extensive publicity she engineered. Madame, as she appeared in those photos, was everything implied by the word soignée, her hair glossily in place, her skin matte, white, and flawless, her lips a perfectly outlined scarlet jewel, her face—even in her sixties and seventies—preternaturally devoid of wrinkles. Often pictured in her lab coat, she looked calm, dignified, smooth, youthful, elegant, an image of perfection that was far from the chaotic and substantial reality. “I had to airbrush inches from her waist!” moaned photographer Cecil Beaton after snapping the distinctly rotund Madame of the 1930s; and snapshots taken at less guarded moments show how much of this ideal look was achieved by a combination of skillful makeup and photographer’s artifice. But the alteration had a significance over and above vanity. It was the photographs, not the unretouched reality, that defined the look women wanted to emulate; and the cosmetics those photographs sold gave them the means to do so.

Other cosmetics companies of course used their own endorsers, chosen from among society’s enviable strata—which at first meant socialites. During the 1920s, Pond’s Cold Cream divided these ladies into two classes—$1,000 people and $500 people—approaching them for endorsements around the twentieth of the month, when their allowances were getting depleted. They also recruited some genuine aristocrats from Europe—the Duchesse de Richelieu, Lady Mountbatten, and Queen Marie of Romania “a bargain [who] endorsed for $2,000, two silver boxes, and a miniature of herself by de Laszlo.”30 There, under a misty photograph, nestled the illustrious name; but you would have been hard put to identify its original if you passed her in the street.

Soon, however, these blurry socialites were supplanted by a new, specifically photographic aristocracy: film stars. Traditionally, actresses had been classed with courtesans, and had ranked similarly low in society. But photography—and, a little later, and definitively, cinematography—transformed them into goddesses, their images known and worshipped across the world. Constance Talmadge, one of the great stars of the silent screen, was said to have posed for 400 testimonial photographs in one day, “showing a set of white teeth due to the exclusive use of Pepsodent, Iodent, Kolynos, Dentyne, Ipoma, Squibbs, Lyon’s, Colgate’s or Pebeco.”31 Between takes, maids would help change her outfit, and stagehands would rearrange the settings.

These endorsement photographs were quite obviously posed. But soon a different class of pictures entered the public’s photographic consciousness: the off-duty “snapshots” that became such an important part of Hollywood publicity. These photographs, the public was given to understand, represented the movie gods and goddesses in their casual, offscreen moments. The truth, of course, was that nothing could have been less casual: those perfectly clear complexions with their carefully graded highlights, those huge, mascaraed eyes, those big scarlet lips, that hair glowing with improbable brilliance and color, were the result of careful makeup, endless posing, skillful lighting, and, usually, extensive retouching.

And it was this denatured photographic “naturalness” that women tried to reproduce through cosmetics. You ladled on the foundation and powder, the eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick, and left the house camera-ready. Even in the most dimly day-lit offices and high streets, people felt undressed if they weren’t wearing long black lashes, blue-shadowed eyes, bright red lips, and pancake foundation, as though imminently about to face the klieg lights. Traveling in the New York subway one day, I was struck by the unusually beautiful complexion of the young woman opposite—only to be confounded a few seconds later as she opened her bag, took out a makeup kit, and proceeded to cover her face with pink gloop. When she’d finished she looked just like everyone else, which, presumably, was the intention. Office life required this bland, smoothed-over, highly colored look. Even some men in the public eye—think Tony Blair, John Edwards—now feel undressed without the layer of artificial tan to which constant studio exposure has accustomed them—and us.

So people’s notion of what constituted a “normal” appearance was rejigged to fit the movies. But the conspiracy was, on the whole, benign. Not only were the cosmetics companies happy, so was the woman in the street. At least the effect she sought was achievable. The Helena Rubinstein of the advertisements might be an artifact, but she was a self-created artifact. Artur Rubinstein the pianist, her friend, compatriot, and neighbor in New York (though no relation), would watch from his Park Avenue window, directly opposite her makeup room, as Madame, then well into her seventies, painstakingly constructed the face she wished to present to the world—a ritual he found touching, impressive, and, as a public performer himself, understandable.32 And the final result, though heavily worked, nevertheless remained rooted in actual appearance. With time and expertise you, too, could construct a comparably perfect surface: a carapace that (if you followed wartime Vogue’s instructions, applying the color, blotting, powdering, reapplying, reblotting, repowdering . . .) would carry you through the day without cracking. The products were within most people’s easy financial reach, and the effort was free.

Today, all is different. The fashion pages and celebrity magazines no longer represent living women and men but a sort of meta-world. In the film The September Issue, about Vogue magazine, there is a wonderfully self-referential scene where the cameraman is persuaded to become part of the fashion shoot he is filming. He is of normal shape—that is to say, his stomach is not perfectly flat. When Anna Wintour, the editor, views the resulting pictures, her immediate reaction is to call the Photoshop studio to have the offending inches shaved down. They are an intrusion: they have no place in the world Vogue sets out to create. In Vogue-world, as in the world of “procedures,” reality is merely a starting point. Just when the universal takeup of cosmetic surgery, Botox, and the rest began to shift the boundaries of what could be achieved in recasting the body, Photoshop began to revolutionize the photographic image. Ever since, the two have been twinned.

The acknowledged master of Photoshop is Pascal Dangin, a Frenchman living in New York. He works for (among others) Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, the New York Times Magazine. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz and Steven Meisel, “rarely work with anyone else.” For Leibovitz, he is a sort of validator of her craft. “Just by the fact that he works with you, you think you’re good. If he works with you a lot, maybe you think, Well, maybe I’m worthwhile.”33

Lauren Collins of The New Yorker spent several months shadowing Dangin for a profile, “Pixel Perfect.” Here she describes him at work on some pictures of an actress:

“She looks too small because she’s teeny,” he said. On a drop-down menu, he selected a warping tool, a device that augments the volume of clusters of pixels. The dress puffed up pleasingly, as if it had been fluffed by some helpful lady-in-waiting inside the screen.

Next, Dangin moved the mouse so the pointer hovered near the actress’s neck. “I softened the collarbones, but then she started to get too retouched, so I put back some stuff,” he explained. He pressed a button and her neck got a little bonier. He clicked more drop-down menus—master opacity stamp, clone stamp. [This] minimized the actress’s temples, which bulged a little, tightened the skin around her chin, and excised a fleshy bump from her forehead. She had an endearingly crooked bottom row of teeth, which Dangin knew better than to fix. . . .

Another time, Dangin showed me how he had restructured the chest . . . of an actress who, to his eye, seemed to have had a clumsy breast enhancement. Like a double negative, virtual plastic surgery cancelled out real plastic surgery, resulting in a believable look.34

Even the recent Dove campaign, which uses larger women to model underwear in an attempt to counteract the relentlessly skinny ideal promoted by the fashion industry, was Danginized. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” Dangin said. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”35

Routine retouching of this kind has created an ever-greater distance between what the beauty business tells us we ought to look like and what is achievable. The pictures of the possible and desirable that we carry inside our head are no longer based upon images of actual bodies. Jay Nicholls, the dancer who so loves her Botox, is thinking of using it to prevent underarm sweating. Not because sweating presents a particular problem: “I already use a roll-on solution that stops me sweating for two weeks.” But she “would love to be able to stop it for longer.”36 What’s sweating, after all? A mere bodily function. And who, these days, has any patience for those? Inside and out, we prefer the virtual ideal.

Of course people are aware of this disjunction. And the nervousness it arouses is reflected in their fury when the image of some well-known icon appears so heavily reconstructed that it is no longer possible to pretend these images reflect reality. With L’Oréal’s Beyoncé and Pinto pictures, many of the protests were prompted by the perceived racism of the alterations. But race played no part in the controversy surrounding the heavily doctored images of actress Kate Winslet published by Vanity Fair in November 2008. “Those of us who are not legally blind will instantly realize that the woman on the cover looks nothing like the real Kate Winslet. Is the woman an imposter? An evil twin? Or just the result of hundreds of man hours of digital retouching? I’m going with ‘alien,’ ” typically announced one blog.37

A video has recently been doing the rounds of YouTube. Marked “Every Teenage Girl Should See This,” it shows a transformation scene: a normally pleasant-looking young woman Photoshopped before your eyes, her neck lengthened, her face thinned, her eyebrows raised, her complexion clarified: duckling to swan. Photographically, she becomes the beauty no “procedures”—and certainly no makeup—will ever make her in real life. How the girl in question feels, faced with so clear and unattainable an image of what she might look like if she only looked different, we are not told.

Unsurprisingly, the now habitual digital enhancement of fashion and glamour images has given rise to a good deal of agonizing. The British Liberal Democrat Party is so perturbed by its pernicious influence on young girls’ self-esteem that it has proposed a new law. Just as cigarette manufacturers must print a warning on every packet announcing that tobacco is lethal, so they want every photographic image to be accompanied by a message saying whether or not it has been doctored.38

Our great-great-grandmothers encased their bodies in whalebone in pursuit of the eighteen-inch waist; our mothers covered their faces with paste and powder so that they might look like their favorite film stars. And today’s women turn to the knife and the needle, liposucking off some inches here, tightening a jawline there, plumping out this fallen cheek, lifting that recalcitrant breast, in a never-ending, inevitably futile attempt to achieve the ultimate unreality: Photoshop.

IV

When Helena Rubinstein started out in business, men held the upper hand, financially and socially. And men decreed that respectable women should go unpainted.

Over the next half-century, the beauty industry ran hand in hand with women’s progress toward an equal place in the public world. Painting one’s face and cutting one’s hair signaled a new universe of choice and possibility. It is no coincidence that lipstick, between the 1920s and the 1950s, was bright, bright red. Helena Rubinstein’s motives were of course commercial: she wanted to be rich. But she also wanted independence, the right to control both her life and her money. And the cosmetics industry not only granted her wishes, it reflected her customers’ similar aspirations.

Today the wheel has come full circle. Cosmetics and cosmetic “procedures,” far from being unthinkable, have become almost compulsory. Who, now, dares be the only one in the room with wrinkles? Ironically, although women’s independence and equality are enshrined in law, their appearance is once again under someone else’s control.

And that someone is usually a man. Ninety percent of those “having work done,” both in Europe and America, are women. And 90 percent of cosmetic surgeons are men. Although the British Association of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons has 850 members, only 98 of them are women. In America, not one of New York magazine’s nominated “Best Doctors” for cosmetic surgery in 2008 was a woman. An online trawl through plastic surgeons in New York and Los Angeles turned up only four women’s names.

This gender imbalance does not mean that male plastic surgeons exercise some sinister power over their female patients. However, it does reflect the extent to which, in this world of supposed equality, men rather than women still tend to be the active agents. And nowhere is this truer than in the world the beauty industry now inhabits: the world of big business.

In her groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Betty Friedan asked why so many highly educated American women were effectively abandoning careers. Instead, they were devoting their energies to homemaking, which, despite all the propaganda in its favor, left them bored, frustrated, depressed, and unfulfilled. Friedan concluded that in postwar America, women’s “really crucial function . . . [was] to buy more things for the home.” An entire industry of advertising and market research devoted itself to persuading them to do so. And since the marketing men had decided that “a woman’s attitude toward housekeeping appliances cannot be separated from her attitude towards homemaking in general,” it had become commercially imperative that as many women as possible spend time at home being what business labeled “true housewives.” From the sellers’ standpoint, career women were considered “unhealthy.” And the persuaders had conveyed their message so successfully that the American career woman had become an endangered species.39

Partly as a result of Friedan’s book, that changed. But the sellers still needed to sell. So they expanded their sights to include not just the home but the body—which of course accompanies you wherever you go and whoever you are. And although the beauty business, the industry concerned with bodies, had traditionally been a female enterprise, that now began to change. The structure of the market thus remained what it had been pre-Friedan. The buyers were mostly women, the sellers mostly men.

Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder, the great names in twentieth-century cosmetics, got where they did because men hadn’t yet cottoned on to beauty’s commercial possibilities. But by the time Friedan began her research, they had begun to do so. Patrick O’Higgins, offered a job by Helena Rubinstein in 1955, wandered uncertainly past the drugstore windows, eyeing the products. His first thought was, “Golly! Who ever buys all this crap?” and his second, “Women’s names! Women’s work?” Only when he noticed the other names—Max Factor, Revlon, Charles Antell—did he reflect that “The beauty business is an enormous industry.”40 And that made it suitable for men. Once the likes of Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden had made beauty’s commercial possibilities apparent, the boys moved in.

Now they have taken full control. The beauty business has become very big business indeed—and big business in the twenty-first century is a male preserve. A survey released in March 2010 found that only 10 percent of directors in Britain’s top 100 companies are women, and twenty-five of the top firms had no women board members at all.41 Whatever the potion, the firm manufacturing it will almost certainly be run by men. And that firm will likely be L’Oréal, which now owns more than 400 subsidiaries and 500 brands, spanning 150 different countries, including (in addition to Helena Rubinstein) consumer products Maybelline, Softsheen, Garnier, CCB; luxury products Lancôme, Biotherm, Kiehl’s, Shue Uemura; the fragrance lines of Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren, Cacharel, Lanvin, Viktor & Rolf, Diesel, and YSL Beauté; professional products Kerastase, Redken, Matrix, Mizani, Shue Uemura Art of Hair; cosmoceuticals Vichy, La Roche Posay, Innéov, Skinceuticals, Sanoflore; The Body Shop; and Laboratories Ylang, the main producer of cosmetics in Argentina, where L’Oréal now controls 25 percent of the cosmetics market.

Seventy percent of L’Oréal’s chemists are women. In Lindsay Owen-Jones’s words, “the future of the company is in their hands at that level.”42 But the board is another matter. L’Oréal’s board of directors contains three women—Liliane Bettencourt, her daughter Françoise Bettencourt-Meyers, and Annette Roux, whose family runs a yacht-making business in Brittany, not far from L’Arcouest. But none of these sits on the ten-strong management committee, where all the firm’s real planning is done. At the time of this writing, the committee contained just one woman: the director of communications, Béatrice Dautresme—the same proportion as in the British survey and, as it happens, an exact echo of the proportions of males to females among cosmetic surgeons.

The constant concern of boards such as L’Oréal’s—the ambition of all big business, as shareholders press for ever-higher dividends—is expansion: to increase revenues and profits. And as the main cosmetic market of mostly middle-aged women approaches saturation, new avenues are being explored. One highly controversial trend encourages very young women to start Botox treatment preemptively, to prevent lines before they form: a 2009 market research survey found that there was particular growth of interest in “procedures” among teenagers.43

There is also the still largely untapped pool of men. Helena Rubinstein’s wartime cosmetics packs for soldiers developed into a postwar male market for such products as deodorants and aftershave. But despite breakthroughs (such as President Reagan’s much-touted use of Grecian 2000 hair dye) men never went for cosmetics in a big way. However, today’s fixation with youthfulness and attainable perfection affects both sexes. As the world gets fatter, and man-boobs (“moobs”) proliferate, more and more men are opting for breast reductions. The British Association of Plastic Surgeons reported an 80-percent rise in demand for this operation in 2009.44 And they’re worrying about their wrinkles. Boots’ “Protect and Perfect” line now includes a special range for men, while in a recent advertising campaign, a succession of aging male icons including Pierce Brosnan, the last James Bond but one, fronted for L’Oréal’s tautening cream “Revitalift.” If straight men can be induced to share what was once a dread exclusive to women and gays, the potential market at once grows by almost 50 percent.

Whatever the sex of the consumer, however, the world of cosmetics is still, as it always has been, associated with social control. In Madame Rachel’s day, the argument was about keeping women in their place. For Helena Rubinstein, cosmetics were her route to emancipation; for her generation of women, they symbolized freedom. For Eugène Schueller, convinced that control and authority were essential aspects of a good society in which “Adam delved while Eve span,” they paradoxically conferred the means to enforce dictatorship. And now, when Madame Rachel’s “Beautiful For Ever” is literally and routinely attainable, the cosmetics world is the visible expression of a society in which anything is available to those with the means to buy it. The body has become a mere canvas, upon which the digital-age beauty business remasters our image of what is physically possible. But since perfection is ipso facto unattainable, what is really on offer, in the world of beauty as elsewhere, is infinite discontent.