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      “CHEMICALS OF THE TOILETTE”

       From Homemade Remedies to a New Industrial Order

      ALTHOUGH TRAVELERS AND naturalists’ fascination with Indian plucking and shaving would seem to indicate that whites themselves possessed no analogous habits, the prevalence of recipes for homemade hair removers in eighteenth-century domestic manuals and etiquette guides suggests that some of their contemporaries, at least, were seasoned hands at hair removal. Steeped in the same humoral theories of health that informed the work of Linnaeus, Buffon, and other prominent natural philosophers, ordinary colonial women viewed facial complexion as a reflection of underlying temperament and spirit. An “unblemished” face was a primary standard of physical beauty in the eighteenth century, an achievement distinguished, in part, by upper lips and temples free of visible fuzz. The woman afflicted by a troublingly “low forehead” might find an array of recipes for homemade pastes and powders to alleviate the problem.¹

      In the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, these time-worn domestic remedies began to be replaced by packaged commodities, which drew hair removal into emerging, opaque systems of manufacturing in novel ways. As long as economic development remained centered in the individual household or plantation and its surrounding farmland, women maintained crucial positions in the production of food, fabric, candles, medicines, and other household goods. Tools for hair removal, too, were created within the household, concocted primarily by women and girls for their own use—or, in the case of enslaved and indentured women, for the use of other women in the household. But as the uneven process of industrial development unfolded, women gradually were less and less likely to weave their own cloth, preserve their own meat, or mold their own soap. Similarly, women and girls who sought to clear their complexions of hair became less likely to make their own depilatory compounds than to purchase them premade, relying as they did so on industrial-grade chemicals of unknown, often dubious quality. That reliance gave rise to understandable ambivalence about whether potentially injurious commercial hair removers might cause more suffering than the “disfiguring” growths they were meant to remedy—a concern reflected and assuaged in the marketing of the new commodities as based on ancient “Eastern” or “Oriental” beauty recipes.

      THE PALE, UNBLEMISHED face so central to eighteenth-century European standards of feminine beauty was no less valued in early-nineteenth-century America. Like scars or red blotches, visible hairs on the face or neck—those areas of the female body exposed by prevailing modes of dress—were considered “deformities” anathema to the reigning porcelain ideal.² Physiognomy, the study of physical appearance revived and popularized most effectively by the Swiss clergyman Johann Kaspar Lavater, picked up on humoralism’s emphasis on complexion as a reflection of inner character. Lavater and his followers similarly correlated the distinctive pallor of racially and economically privileged women with moral virtue, valorizing the pale, smooth feminine face with the authority of physiognomic expertise.³

      Despite the moral stigma associated with a faint moustache or troublingly “low forehead,” antebellum women suffering from conspicuous hair had few good options at their disposal. Sticky plasters made from shoemakers’ waxes or tree resins were available, but appear to have been used primarily in the treatment of ringworm and other ailments.⁴ Most nonenslaved women probably avoided shaving their faces for the same reason that so many men did: in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shaving could be an unpleasant, even dangerous experience. Most shaving was accomplished with a sharpened edge of metal known as a “free hand” or “cut throat” razor, the use of which required both careful maintenance and considerable skill. As one scholar of shaving summarizes, “bloodbaths could only be prevented by experienced hands.”⁵ Sporadic reports of syphilis being transmitted by unskilled barbers—possible through direct contact with open sores—may have increased reluctance to shave.⁶ Prior to the advent of covered “safety” razors at the turn of the twentieth century, shaving was a relatively rarefied activity: men of means did not shave themselves, but instead relied on the services of skilled barbers.⁷

      Barbering itself, moreover, was a craft dominated by men. In colonial America, as in eighteenth-century England, barbering was associated with bone setting, tooth extraction, bloodletting (to rebalance humors), and other aspects of medical “physick.” Until 1745, barbers shared a guild with surgeons, as fellow craftsmen engaged in the manual manipulation of bodies. Surgeons eventually severed their historic ties with barber-surgeons to create a distinct medical specialty, one more closely aligned with physicians and their learned, gentlemanly rank. Even then, women remained excluded from the skilled occupation of barbering just as they were from the medical professions. In multiple ways, then, antebellum American women were discouraged from using or submitting their faces and necks to the blade.⁸

      Homemade depilatories therefore offered an appealing and relatively accessible alternative for banishing visible hair. In the context of a general aversion for “face-painting” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (powder and rouge were negatively associated with both aristocracy and prostitution), depilatories fell into the category of efforts to “transform the skin” that were considered generally socially acceptable. From the first years of white