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U.S. women in the nation's early days used powdered chalk and fresh-cut beet juice for beauty, but the onset of the Victorian age made "paint and powder" the hallmark of the dance-hall girl or the woman of the street. The Gibson girl, created by Artist Charles Dana Gibson, was the modest and aloof dream girl of U.S. males in the early years of the century. It was not until World War I that makeup crawled back to respectability, and not until the Roaring Twenties that it dared to flaunt its painted face—under a permanent wave, invented in Switzerland by Charles Nessler. This wonderful electric gadget brought hope that every head could be curly—though many a hair curled at the early cost: $200. (In 1938 San Francisco's Willat company introduced the cold wave, which gradually made the machine permanent obsolete.)
Though the Depression cut into the beauty business, it eventually proved a boon by getting more women out to work, making them more conscious of their appearance. In World War II Washington politicians foolishly talked of abolishing the beauty industry for the duration to save materials. But wiser heads prevailed. (When Hitler banned makeup, the women of Germany simply refused to work.) The industry put its lipsticks in cardboard containers, found substitutes for strategic materials. One substitute: a cream type of hair tonic that is outselling the older oil type today. By war's end, sales of cosmetics had increased 53%.
Beauty in the Supermarkets. Postwar, Revlon's Charlie Revson sparked a significant change for the beauty industry when he bought The $64,000 Question. Revlon's sales jumped 54% in the program's first year, and others hustled to take to the air. To recoup the high cost of TV advertising quickly, firms had to tout specific products instead of whole lines, moved more and more products out of drug and department stores and into the mass-selling supermarkets. Today, more than one-fifth of the toilet preparations are sold in food stores. The industry sees no reason why it cannot use similar techniques to tap the new mass market of men's cosmetics (deodorants, hair tonics, etc.). So far, men have been reluctant to shop for their own toiletries, but the industry hopes to spur them to buy more avidly.
The industry confesses to a bigger failure. It can find no way to get U.S. women to buy more perfume. Partly because of its advertising, the industry has given many women the idea that perfume 1) is a precious commodity to be used sparingly, and 2) may provoke a passionate male onslaught before the evening has even begun. On their own, many U.S. women seem to think that perfume is out of step with the clean, sporty American look. Though makers sold $110 million worth of fragrance products last year (top three perfumes: Arpege, Chanel No. 5, My-Sin), the perfume market has barely expanded in the last ten years. "Perfume is a woman's secret weapon," says Jean Desprèes, executive vice president of Coty,
Inc. "But we don't know how to tell her." Proof of Desprèes's statement is the fact that Coty, once the perfume industry's leader, lost $1,071,608 last year.