Hope in a jar

Drawing on a wealth of archival sources - beauty guides and advice manuals, women's letters and diaries, advertisements and rare market research - historian Kathy Peiss traces our modern beauty culture from the buttermilk and rice powder recommended by Victorian recipe books to the mass-produced products emblematic of contemporary consumer culture.

Today cosmetics are synonymous with the exploitation of women's anxieties, but Peiss looks back to uncover a vivid history in which women, far from being pawns and victims, used makeup to declare their freedom, identity, and sexual allure. Peiss highlights the leading role of white and black women - Helena Rubinstein and Annie Turnbo Malone, Elizabeth Arden and Madam C. J. Walker - in shaping an industry unique in the business world. Relying less on advertising than on women's customs of visiting and conversation, these beauty entrepreneurs wove their trade into the fabric of women's everyday lives, creating a kind of "sociable commerce" in which salesmanship blended with "women helping women" and door-to-door canvassing ("Avon calling") built on habits of neighborliness. From exclusive hair salons to straightening parlors, Peiss depicts the parallel but segregated beauty trades that thrived until the 1920s, when corporations run by men entered the lucrative field, creating a mass consumer culture that codified modern femininity.