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Lilies & Placenta. But the beauty industry is far more interested in finding new products than rescuing old ones, is moving more and more into research. Revlon has more than 70 chemists on its staff, and about half its current sales are from products introduced since 1950, e.g., high-gloss lipstick. Top Brass hair dressing for men and hair sprays. Charlie Revson, who proclaims that "research is a deep religion with me," likes to don a white coat and take a turn at the retorts. On the average, a product takes from a year and a half to two years from conception to store shelves. Bringing out a simple item like a new lipstick costs from $200,000 to $400,000 for such necessities as experimenting to get the exact color, market testing, replacing old advertising and color cards.
Since few firms have unique products, they often try to outdo each other in boastful bragging about what they do have. Helena Rubinstein, who styles herself the "First Lady of Beauty Science," claims that her Tree of Life cream contains extract of human placenta "from nature's storehouse of nutrients for the unborn baby." To supply juice of water lilies for some of her other products, she keeps convents of nuns in London and Paris busy growing lilies. A year ago Lilly Dacheé introduced a finishing powder "which actually contains pulverized pearls," claimed that it made the skin glow, the eyes sparkle.
Few items have given rise to such extravagant claims as royal jelly, the creamy substance produced by nurse bees to nourish the long-lived queen bee in the hive. When it came out, women swarmed around the beauty counters, attracted by ads that called royal jelly "the secret of eternal youth." More than a dozen cosmetic houses rushed to put it in high-priced creams, soaps, even lipsticks. (France's house of Orlane, reasoning that the bees got their jelly from flowers, went one better and put on the U.S. market a cream "created from the precious pollen of the orchid.")
But those who bought royal jelly had a right to feel stung. Reported the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau newsletter: "There is little evidence to support any significant therapeutic, cosmetic or nutritional value in the product for humans." Says Maison G. DeNavarre, chief chemist of Michigan's Beauty Counselors, Inc.: "Royal Queen jelly is not even for the birds. It is for the bees. It is a fad and does nothing for the skin."
To control the industry's enthusiasm for extravagant claims and keep a watch out for harmful ingredients, both the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration occasionally have to step in. FTC allows harmless puffs—"ours is best"—draws the line at "youth-reviving creams" and at any inference that cells can be reborn by potions. Not only are claims sometimes false, but products downright harmful. The FDA recently ordered Ten-Day Press-On Nail Polish off the market in several states after 700 women complained that it made their nails split and break.