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A front runner in the race to slim the shapeless is Slenderella, with 187 salons across the nation. Founded in 1950 by a hustling Missourian, Larry Mack, it has succeeded in making reducing seem glamorous and effortless with slick promotion and plush salons, last year put 300,000 customers through their paces. In a private-treatment booth, the hopeful Slenderella customer takes off her shoes and girdle, and lies down upon a flat leather couch. She gets a free supply of mint-flavored vitamin wafers. While dreamy music murmurs in the background, the couch begins to massage her gently, taking up each bulging part as she moves her shoulders and hips over the table's vibrating platform. Suddenly she takes off! The machine changes pace, shakes her vigorously for several minutes in a horseback-like rhythm known in the trade as "the Seabiscuit." She dismounts a happier woman. Slenderella claims that 40 minutes on the table, at $2, is the equivalent of a ten-mile horseback ride. The Stauffer System, a top Slenderella rival that claims to serve nearly a million patrons a year in its 250 salons, says that a similar treatment on its couches equals nine holes of golf.
"It's very slick," says a West Coast housewife who has made the rounds of the reducing salons. "They measure you at once. They make you feel like a horse —and you usually are." Even if you are not, some salons know well how to show a customer just how much she has lost. When she enrolls, measurements are taken with the tape loose; when she finishes a course, measurements are taken with the tape tight.
For both men and women, countless gyms have also sprung up offering more active exercise. The biggest, American Health Studios Inc. (278 studios), has attracted 4,500,000 Americans, is expanding at the rate of 15 studios a month. Its Silhouette salons guarantee women (now 60% of its total business) the loss of 15 Ibs. in two months if they are overweight, the addition of two inches to the bust if they are undersized.
The slenderizing craze has gone far beyond the salon walls. The makers of Relax-A-cizor, a small black vibrating case bristling with pink dials, belts and other gadgets, claim to have placed their product in 200,000 homes since 1949, at $200 a throw. "It feels," said one man who tried it, "like a slight case of electrocution." A handful of firms also turn out vibrating furniture that promises to help blood circulation, relax tired muscles, and keep weight down. Says Bert Goodrich of American Health Studios: "If this fantastic trend toward healthier and better physique continues, we're going to turn into a race of supermen."
Treat & Beautify. Whatever form the race for beauty and health takes, its tempo is sure to speed up. As medical science enables more people to live longer —and feel younger—they will also want to look younger. Enormous demand will have to be met for special cosmetics for the aged, the allergic and the young with bad skin, safe and odorless depilatories and permanents, a hair spray that will give a natural curl out of an aerosol can.