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With its irresistible combination of spur and promise, the U.S. beauty industry has made U.S. women the world's best groomed. "It is well known around the world," says British-born Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, "that American women are the most beautiful—and that they can make themselves even better than they are. The beauty industry is, socially, highly important and desirable. There is certainly a magic transformation performed on women who enter appearing like Mrs. Malaprop and leave as beautifully embellished as Madame Recamier reclining on her chaise longue."
No Recession. The beauty industry fears no recession, for a woman will give up food before her pursuit of beauty—and often because of it. The U.S. spent an estimated $4 billion on beauty aids and services in 1957. Sales of toilet preparations—heart of the beauty business—amounted to $1.4 billion in 1957, up 8.3% from the year before and almost double ten years ago. In 1958 the industry expects to have the best year in its history.
Beauty aids, once considered a luxury, are now a necessity—especially to the 20 million women who have jobs. Young girls now battle parents to wear cosmetics in grammar school, and women's magazines are full of frightening stories about older women who let themselves go—and wake up to find their husbands gone. "A woman who doesn't wear lipstick," says Max Factor, president of one of the top five U.S. cosmetics firms, "feels undressed in public. Unless she works on a farm." The result: 95% of all women over the age of twelve now use at least one of the products manufactured by the U.S. beauty industry.
Fickle Woman. The fickleness of woman is a fearsome fact that can make or break a firm. But the beauty business has turned it to advantage by bringing out new products in the twinkling of an eye. The home permanents (led by Toni) threatened to empty the beauty shops. The short, or poodle, haircut filled them up—and home-permanent sales slumped 29% last year. Hair coloring, hardly respectable a few years ago, has grown into a $35 million do-it-yourself business and a $200 million beauty parlor market; three women in ten now tint, rinse or bleach their hair.
The emphasis on speed and convenience has attracted millions of new customers. The oldtime mudpacks have been replaced by Pond's 37-second face cream; Mrs. Potter's walnut-juice stain, a turn-of-the-century hair dye, has given way to Roux's five-minute hair rinse. The squeeze bottle and the aerosol container have revolutionized the use of old products, led to new ones, e.g., hair spray, which has grown to an $84 million business in only seven years.
To supply the old as well as the new, some 2,600 companies are directly engaged in the manufacture of cosmetics. Milwaukee's Kolmar Laboratories, the world's largest private-label manufacturer of cosmetics, produces 1.800 shades of lipstick, uses 20.000 different cosmetic formulas for the 385 U.S. firms it serves. There are 110,000 beauty salons, more than twice the number of drugstores. And more than 5 million Americans patronize some 750 reducing salons and thousands of health and massage clubs.