Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  If you believed Helena Rubinstein’s advertising, her various creams and lotions were miracle balms that banished blemishes and left the user’s skin blissfully free of wrinkles. And since that was what her customers ached to believe, they convinced themselves that it was true—or, at the very least, that the creams prevented deterioration. There was never any proof, however, that this was actually so. By the 1930s a large number of firms were marketing beauty products of various kinds, and in 1934 the pressure group Consumer Research organized a survey of them, the first attempt at any systematic analysis of what beauty creams did. It showed that most beauty products did not live up to their claims, while some were even dangerous. None of the creams marketed by Helena Rubinstein or her competitors had, Consumer Research reported, any measurable effect on wrinkles, while the notion that skin needed three or four different types of cream—cold cream, cleansing cream, vanishing cream, and skin food—was a myth invented to increase sales. Worse, the glycerine frequently used in vanishing cream was a common allergen that often caused rashes.

  Beauticians like Rubinstein and her peers thus trod a wobbly psychological tightrope. On the one hand they shared their customers’ profound desire to believe the propaganda. On the other, they knew—none better!—that what went into their products was really nothing but the same old less-than-magical stuff women had always used, repackaged and skillfully sold. The Consumer Research survey therefore filled them with dread. On the day its results were published, in a book called Skin Deep, the cosmetics industry threw a party for magazine editors at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. The captive audience was harangued for an hour and a half on the wickedness of reformers and consumers’ research organizations and the irresponsible anticosmetic prejudice of the American Medical Association. It was magazines’ duty, the speaker perorated, to help preserve a million-dollar industry, now irresponsibly imperiled. Meanwhile the worst offenders hastened to change their more offensive products—Max Factor removing barium sulphate colors, which caused rashes, from its lipstick lines, Pond’s discontinuing the use of rice starch, which clogged the pores, in its face powder. But there was little they could do to make products such as face creams perform the wonders promised in the advertising copy—and they knew it.

  As it happened, they need not have worried. The public bought the book, which swiftly rose up the bestseller charts—and went on with their usual cosmetic routines. No exposé, however painstaking, could outweigh the magical allure of hope. A reader from California spoke for many. Skin Deep had “quite shattered my illusions as to the efficacy of cosmetics,” she wrote. But despite being “a college graduate and a schoolteacher, I don’t really so much believe what saleswomen tell me as I hope that what they tell me will come true.”1 This blind and unquenchable desire—a desire that she herself shared—was the foundation of Madame’s fortune.

  L’Oréal was a different matter entirely. Like Helena Rubinstein, Eugène Schueller owed his success to both luck and talent. But his talent was for science, and his luck to have been presented with an opening that, left to himself, he would never have espied. In the beauty industry, whose claims routinely bore little if any relation to reality, his product was unique in that both he and his customers knew it would always do precisely what the package promised. L’Oréal worked: it would dye your hair any color you wished—and safely. And this was possible because of perhaps the greatest of all the differences between Eugène Schueller and Helena Rubinstein: he was educated, where she was not. The foundation of her business was folk wisdom; Schueller’s business rested on science. What was applicable to hair dye was applicable elsewhere, too. He could make other products, in other industries, and realize their possibilities as he had realized L’Oréal’s. It was simply a matter of time.

  II

  Eugène Schueller, born in 1881, was nine years younger than Helena Rubinstein. He, too, came from a poor background. His grandfather was a shoemaker, his father a pastry cook, his mother a baker’s assistant. The Schueller family originated in Alsace, the much-disputed Rhineland province on the borders of France and Germany. Eugène’s father, Charles, who considered himself French and did not wish to be a German subject, had come to Paris with his wife, Amélie, after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, when Germany occupied Alsace.

  They bought a little patisserie at 124 rue du Cherche-Midi, in Montparnasse, where five sons would be born.1 Only one, Eugène, made it past infancy.2 And for this one surviving child the Schuellers would make any sacrifice. He was bright, and they determined to give him a good education, whatever it might cost. That way he might escape the hand-to-mouth poverty that constrained their own lives, forcing them to work from six every morning (five on Sundays) until ten at night (on Sundays till eleven) 365 days a year.

  Young Eugène was expected to take his share of the work. From the age of four he buttered tart tins and shelled almonds before leaving for school in the morning. The habit he then acquired, of early rising in order to lead two or more parallel existences, would remain with him. Later, when he gave lectures or interviews, he often described himself as “Monsieur 6,000 hours” (2,000 hours a year being a normal conscientious working life). “Do you know what a 6,000 hours man is?” he demanded during a 1954 lecture at the Paris École de Commerce. “It’s someone who will work more than sixteen hours a day, 365 days a year, without Saturdays, Sundays or holidays.”3

  His daily routine showed what this work involved. He rose at four, and for two hours, in his dressing gown, addressed all the questions raised by colleagues the previous day. Then came an hour’s walk in the company of a physical-training instructor, followed by breakfast, when he read the papers. By the time his secretary arrived at eight a pile of notes and letters awaited her, each with the reply indicated in the margin. This secretary was the object of his pride and admiration: Schueller, possibly because he was rather deaf, could never believe anything was real unless it was written down, and she could take dictation at the speed of light.4 Another pile had penciled reminders of the replies he would dictate; a third had been read and thought about. Other replies were decided upon while the first batch were dictated. This went on until midday, when his Rolls arrived to take him to the Valentine paint factory at Gennevilliers—one of four businesses he was running in 1954, the year he gave the interview setting out this routine. (The others were L’Oréal, Monsavon soap, and a magazine called Votre Beauté.) Office work continued during the drive. At Valentine, he conferred with divisional heads until three p.m., lunching during these discussions on a grapefruit and a cup of tea. Then he left for Monsavon, taking with him a briefcase full of notes, and leaving at five with a second briefcase full. Then it was on to Votre Beauté and a third briefcase, and thence to the offices of L’Oréal, where he stayed until nine p.m. He went to bed at midnight, and slept four hours. But even then his work continued: “My best working-time is when I’m asleep,” he told business journalist Merry Bromberger. “During the afternoon I often listen to people without knowing how to respond. And then during the night I dream I’m in a meeting at L’Oréal, or in the lab with my chemists, and when I get up in the morning most of the necessary decisions have been made.” And so another day began.

  He remembered his early life, which had instilled this habit, as “very rough and hard on us.” But it produced enough money for his parents to send him to a private school, where he got on well. In 1890, however, the Panama Canal Company, in which his father had invested his small savings, failed. The shop had to cl
ose, and there could be no more private school. M. Schueller found a job in a big patisserie at Levallois-Perret, a working-class district on Paris’s northwest outskirts, where Eugène attended the local state school.

  And here, unexpectedly, Eugène’s private education resumed. Levallois abuts rich, leafy Neuilly, where the patisserie supplied a fashionable school, the Collège Sainte-Croix de Neuilly. M. Schueller made a deal with its head: if he made part payment in cakes, he could just afford a place there for his clever son.

  It was a life-changing moment—perhaps the most important thing that ever happened to Eugène Schueller. The Collège Sainte-Croix was a feeder school for the elite Lycée Condorcet, and after that the way was open to the highly competitive grandes écoles—the Polytechnique, the Centrale, the Ponts et Chaussées, the École Normale Supérieure, whose graduates run France. He was all set to join the ruling class.

  He duly made it to Condorcet, where the family scraped together enough to pay the fees. He discovered a bent for science, took his baccalaureate, and was hoping for the École Polytechnique or the École Centrale when his father was wiped out yet again. This time the family, including the sixteen-year-old Eugène, had to return to Alsace, and the German rule they had earlier rejected. His mother kept a market stall, helped by his aunt, whom Eugène remembered watching as she walked to the market barefoot, carrying baskets of goods weighing ten or fifteen kilos on her head. Eugène was apprenticed to a patissier, and also had to help his mother in the market, which he hated. A gifted publicist, he always loathed the business of face-to-face selling.

  He endured this life for a couple of years, and then could bear it no longer. Returning to Paris, he entered the Institute for Applied Chemistry, paying his fees by working nights as a patissier. This was chemistry’s heyday: Mendeleyev had recently formulated the periodic table of the elements, and Marie Curie would soon isolate radium. Eugène graduated top of his class, and Victor Auger, one of his professors, who had become a friend, found him an instructor’s post at the Sorbonne. The way ahead was clear. He would become a research chemist, and, eventually, a professor. Had he continued on this route, his friend Frédéric Joliot-Curie later remarked, he would undoubtedly have made some significant discovery.5

  But he found academic life disappointing—“dusty,” as he phrased it.6 The place, he said, felt like a cemetery. No one in France was much interested in science, there weren’t enough materials at the lab—even the gas supply was unreliable. And no one seemed to work. Accustomed from childhood to a punishing schedule, he felt cheated by academe’s comparatively relaxed pace. Why could one not get into the lab before it officially opened? Why did one have to leave when the bell rang? He would climb in and out through the window before and after hours, sometimes starting work at six a.m., sometimes staying on late into the evening—hours his colleagues inexplicably preferred to spend with their friends and families, or even in bed. He soon left for something less lackadaisical, a job at the Pharmacie Centrale de France, the standard manufacturer of chemical products. He remained there for three years, becoming head of the research laboratory and eventually head of the chemical service and secretary to the editorial board of its publication, the Grande Revue Scientifique.

  Some of the people he met during this trajectory would remain his friends for life. One was Jacques Sadoul, a friend from Condorcet who later became a Communist, and with whom he would conduct an experimental “free university” before World War I. Another was Fred Joliot, who later became Marie Curie’s son-in-law (and who added the Curie name to his own). Joliot and Schueller met at L’Arcouest, a tiny Breton village where the distinguished Sorbonne historian Charles Seignobos kept a cottage. Around the village, in a scatter of houses and rented rooms, a group of all ages known to all as “Sorbonne-sur-mer”—consisting of professors, their families, and their students—passed happy summers sailing, swimming, and living a quasi-communal existence. “A reporter suddenly finding himself in the midst of the peaceful group would have been overjoyed,” Marie Curie’s daughter, Eve, remembered. “He would have had to take great care not to step on some member of the Institut de France lazily stretched out on the ground, or not to kick a Nobel Prize winner. . . . These customs of children or savages, living half-naked in the water and the wind, were later to become the fashion and to intoxicate all classes from the richest to the poorest. But in those days . . . they aroused the shocked criticisms of the uninitiated. In advance of the fashion . . . we discovered beach life, swimming races, sun-bathing, camping out on deserted islands, the tranquil immodesty of sport.”7

  Eugène became part of the group at the invitation of Victor Auger. It was his first introduction to the notion that life, or parts of it, might be spent having fun, and he adored it. Ever after, recreation, for him, meant L’Arcouest and its pastimes. In 1926 he built himself a luxurious house there on a high spit of land that had once been a beautiful orchard. He kept his own yacht, the Edelweiss; Ambre Solaire was invented to counter the sunburn he suffered while sailing it. Sorbonne-sur-mer did not approve. The plot of land had first been noticed, and coveted, by another member of the group, and they found the house pretentious—there was even a colonnade, Fred Joliot remarked with disgust. Worse, he fenced his estate off, something unheard-of.8 Schueller didn’t care. He might love L’Arcouest and its pastimes, but once he became rich, the simple, communal life was not his idea of pleasure.

  The breezy outdoor life at L’Arcouest also set a benchmark for an ideal of feminine beauty. The magazine Votre Beauté, which he established in 1933, always included articles on the healthy sporting life, and promoted a tanned and glowing look that related more to fitness and exercise than paint and powder—something rather unusual in the 1930s.

  But academic life, even as enjoyed by Sorbonne-sur-mer, was not for him, and in 1905, after only two years as an instructor, he glimpsed a way of escape. A hairdresser came to the Pharmacie Central, offering to pay fifty francs a month to someone who would help him find a safe and reliable artificial hair dye. Schueller eagerly volunteered. A harmless hair dye might not be what Fred Joliot meant by an “important discovery,” but it was an interesting problem. Nobody had tackled it before, because hair dye was, as Schueller put it, “such a small part of the scheme of things.”9 That was to say, it was women’s frippery and therefore of little interest to male chemists. Indeed, they retained this blind spot even after it became clear that fortunes were to be made in the beauty business. In 1935, the Consumer Research book Skin Deep declared, “So far as we have been able to learn, there is no hair dye which is both certainly safe and at the same time effective.”10 In fact, such a hair dye had by then existed for nearly thirty years—but it was available only in France, and no American chemist had concerned himself with this problem.

  Schueller discovered that hair dyes were based upon four groups of substances: anilines, silver nitrate, pyrogallic acid, and lead acetate. The first group was the most dangerous. Aniline derivatives are very soluble, going through many intermediate stages before forming the lacquers which give the hair its new color, and some of these derivatives are extremely caustic and may eventually enter the bloodstream, affecting the white cells and giving rise to chemical eczema. Anilines were, nevertheless, the most popular base for hair dyes, because they were easy to prepare. Their dangers were known, but as only 3 to 5 percent of users were adversely affected, they were sold widely. Silver nitrate and lead acetate were less dangerous compounds, though still not altoge
ther safe, but they turned the hair raven-black. “You could see it was artificial a hundred yards away,” Schueller remarked. Such blatant artificiality scandalized people: Eugène’s own mother would point her finger at a neighbor. “She’s using hair dye! And we thought she was a decent woman!” He finished by writing so many articles on the subject for the Grande Revue Scientifique that he eventually made a little book out of them: De l’Innocuité des teintures pour cheveux. (It is not dated, but since among the author’s many listed qualifications—Ingénieur-Chimiste, Diplômé de l’Université de Paris, Ex-préparateur à la Sorbonne, Ex-chef du Laboratoire des Recherches de la Pharmacie Centrale de France—he included “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,” it must have been published after World War I, when he received this decoration.)

  The hair-dye job meant working at the hairdresser’s salon in the evenings, from eight till eleven, at the end of an already unimaginably long day. Eugène’s excessive appetite for hard work had not endeared him to his boss at the Institute, and he soon found himself exiled to a factory at Plaine-St.-Denis, out in the northern suburbs. Work there started at 6:30 a.m. There was as yet no Metro. To arrive in time, he had to get up at 4:30 and take a tram. And at the end of the day, the hairdresser’s salon was on the other side of Paris.

  It was not long before Eugène fell out with the hairdresser—in one account because the hairdresser took no interest in the work, in another because Eugène wanted to claim all the credit for himself. The probable truth was that Eugène’s acute business antennae sensed the moneymaking potential of this work, and he preferred to pursue it on his own. The hairdresser, too, must have had some notion of a harmless hair dye’s commercial possibilities, else he would not have commissioned the work in the first place. He specialized in hair dyes, and his clients referred to his store of bottles as “the fountain of youth,” a phrase potent enough to start the mental cash-registers ringing loud and clear. He had only employed Eugène because he did not know how to make the new product himself and needed a consultant who did. Unfortunately for him, the consultant fate allotted him happened to be that extreme rarity, a brilliant scientist who was also a business genius, and whose sensitivity to potential moneyspinners, and ability to make them spin money, would turn out to surpass that of almost anyone else in France.