Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig
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commercial value of hides.)48 The safety of packaged depilatories—malodorous and irritating at best, lethal at worst—became a persistent concern in antebellum publications. Particularly as commercial preparations began to range beyond familiar household ingredients to include industrially produced chemicals, purchasers became increasingly unsure about just what they might be putting on their faces.49 Occasionally, the potential for injury from packaged depilatories was treated as a source of humor. In 1804, one Boston weekly reported the “amusing” case of a “dowager lady” who followed an advertisement for a “depilatory, or some such name.” The woman rubbed the product around her mouth, removing the hairs yet “taking all the flesh with them.” Because the product “affected her eyes too” (again, some depilatory ingredients could have systemic effects), the injury “obliged her, for some time, to use a black shade; which, with her large mouth, made her look for all the world like Harlequin in a pantomime.”50
Other descriptions did not poke fun at the new dangers facing women. The popular Saturday Evening Post printed a recipe for an “Oriental rusma,” a depilatory made from quicklime, along with a warning to readers that the “very powerful” paste should be used only “with great circumspection.” (The arsenic included in this particular recipe compounded the risk.)51 An 1831 article in Lady’s Book described packaged depilatories comprised of “a preparation of quicklime, or of some other alkaline or corrosive substance.” Such corrosives, the article warned, often result in “very considerable” injuries to the skin, sores that may be “still more unsightly than the defect they were employed to remedy.” Arsenic-based compounds, in particular, pose “the utmost risk to health, if not to life.” The article repeated a conclusion presented in the Journal of Health earlier that year: “Under all circumstances, therefore, we believe it to be far better to put up with the deformity arising from the superfluous hair, than to endanger the occurrence of a greater evil by attempting its eradication.”52
CONCERN ABOUT THE “evils” of corrosive or toxic depilatories persisted through the nineteenth century, as markets in commercial hair removers remained unregulated. By the second half of the nineteenth century, some medical practitioners explicitly pondered the need for oversight of commercial cosmetics as a matter of public health. In 1870, the Medical and Surgical Reporter held up chemical depilatories as particularly deserving of scrutiny in this regard:
When it is remembered that precisely those drugs and chemical agents, which are most actively poisonous, enjoy the highest reputation for their beauty-bestowing power, and yet that the manufacture and sale of these agents in secret preparations, engage millions of dollars of capital annually, in every civilized country, the importance of this inquiry as a branch of state-medicine, becomes very evident.53
Actual legislative oversight of such products, however, was slow in coming. The U.S. Postal Service and the Federal Trade Commission, which prohibited overt fraud by mail, regulated so-called cosmetic preparations only to a limited extent. Despite a growing number of reported injuries and fatalities from commercial depilatories in medical journals, American lawmakers passed no federal regulations governing the manufacture or sale of hair removers until the 1912 Sherley Amendment to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which prohibited “false and fraudulent therapeutic claims on the labels of patent medicines.”54 Even then, the amendment prohibited only certain kinds of labeling; it did nothing to test or guarantee the enclosed products.
In the absence of strong legislation regulating the safety and efficacy of manufactured toiletries, uncertainty bloomed. Purchasers of commercial depilatories had little option but to seek counsel from external advisors about which products to trust and which to avoid. As urbanizing Americans relocated away from the kin and community networks that once helped them to understand and adopt norms of body care, popular newspapers and magazines began assuming an increasingly advisory role. Advertisers, in particular, took on the task of instructing readers when and how to use the stream of products emerging from new arts of manufacture, blanketing growing cities with suggestive copy.55 Depilatory manufacturers were exemplary in this respect, insisting on the “equal certainty and safety” of their hair removers, and warning against the use of “counterfeit” preparations that might co-opt their hard-earned reputations.56
The trajectory of Dr. T. Felix Gouraud provides an illuminating example of the importance of advertising in an emerging industrial order. According to one industry publication, Gouraud first ventured into the toiletry business in New York in 1839. Gaining his initial fame through successful sales of a new complexion cream, he soon expanded into depilatory powders. Dr. Felix Gouraud’s Poudres Subtile for Uprooting Hair was said to remove hair from “low foreheads, upper lips, arms and hands instantaneously on a single application and positively without injury to the skin.” The price for Poudres Subtile was one dollar per bottle—roughly twenty-six dollars in twenty-first-century terms. In the wake of Poudres Subtile, Gouraud’s business sailed upward in the United States and Europe through the 1880s.57
Gouraud’s success in the antebellum depilatory market was tied to his successful manipulation of what would now be referred to as “branding.” (The concept of a consumer “brand” did not emerge until the late nineteenth century, when factories began burning their insignia onto shipping barrels like cattle brands.) Gouraud appears to have excelled at establishing a differentiated presence in the burgeoning market in chemical hair removers, manufacturing an image of safety and efficacy alongside the substance of his powder. Advertisements touting the fabricated Dr. Gouraud name—the manufacturer’s given name was said to be Felix Trust—appeared in city newspapers through midcentury. He also pioneered the use of celebrity testimonials, including endorsements from famous actresses and opera singers. Gouraud’s ability to marshal trust was of particular importance given that the product in question, a caustic depilatory, might cause permanent injury to the user if carelessly made. By 1872, physicians reported that his depilatory was one of the “most common” of all on the market. So successful was the Gouraud label that a long-running legal dispute among Gouraud’s relatives over the right to the “Gouraud” name went all the way to the New York Supreme Court.58
CRUCIALLY, FELIX TRUST presented Gouraud’s Poudres Subtile as bearing not only the ineffable refinement of French culture but also the dreamy allure of the East. Promoting his product as derived from a formula used by the “Queen of Sheba herself,” Gouraud embodied a trend among early depilatory manufacturers: associating their powders and pastes with the European—and now, Euro-American—imagination of “the Orient.”59 Sheba, whose legendary encounter with King Solomon appears in both the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an, was a central figure in such Orientalist imagery. Given fresh popularity in the 1840s by Gerard de Nerval’s account of his travels in the Levant, Voyage en Orient (1843–51), Sheba was a particularly fitting allusion for Gouraud’s product: in some versions of the ancient legend, Solomon summoned demons to make a depilatory, called núra, which he applied to Sheba’s hairy legs.60
Such references to the special, perhaps supernatural potency of “Eastern” depilatory compounds, standard fare in elite and popular writings of the nineteenth century, were part of a longer tradition of “Orientalist fantasy,” one that, Sarah Berry among others has noted, was “integral to the marketing of cosmetics and self-adornment from the eighteenth-century onward.”61 In colonial America and the early republic, fascination with Eastern mores and customs swelled as British and French soldiers, merchants, and diplomats increased their interventions in the Middle and Far East, and grew along with Americans’ own missionary and military ventures in the region. After U.S. Marines marched five hundred miles across what is now the Libyan desert to join the USS Nautilus, USS Hornet, and USS Argus in the bombardment of the port city of Derne in 1805, the role of the Orient in the popular imagination swelled, captured in the famous refrain of the Marine hymn: “to the shores of Tripoli.”62
Interest in Eastern hair removal practices was a recurrent element of that Orientalist preoccupation, particularly for male travelers.63 James Atkinson’s 1832 English translation of Nah’nah Kulsūm’s Customs and Manners of the Women of Persia reflects this preoccupation.64 Atkinson devotes a