C H A P T E R 1

Eyes

"Made-up eyes are by no means desirable, and to many are singularly displeasing. The same, however, may be said of made-up faces generally. Nevertheless it is extensively practiced." --Mrs. Sarah Jane Pierce, Homely Girls, 1890

"As regards cosmetics, the only sin against society seems to be make-up badly applied, The “Would you brush your teeth in public?” attitude towards make-up died some time ago." -Alice-Leone Moats, Nice Girls, 1933

When it comes to flirtation, the eyes can cast a potent spell. An intense gaze is one of the most effective ways a woman can broadcast her interest in a man. (Believe it or not, scientists have actually quantified this.)1 But how is it that eye makeup, particularly mascara, became a standard implement in America’s cosmetic toolbox? Mascara became legitimate in the United States only fairly recently in the historic scheme of things. Many a proper Victorian lady, who had no qualms about inflating her breasts with rubber bust enhancers or upholstering her rear end with a bustle, was vociferously opposed to altering her face with any type of cosmetic. Indeed, the late 1800s brought furious catfights over the legitimacy of rouge pots and eyebrow pencils. Were they the province of sophisticated beauties or the downfall of wanton souls?

Charlotte Smith, editor of The Woman Inventor, argued against the use of cosmetics while the entrepreneur Madame M. Yale vigorously supported women’s right to use them. Both women testified on the subject of cosmetics before the House of Representatives’s Agricultural Committee in 1892. Madame Yale—“young and lovely, with masses of blonde hair”—was a successful businesswoman who had built a company worth $500,000 selling cosmetics, soaps, corsets, and a facial steaming machine.2

Described by the Pittsburgh Leader as a “priestess of the cosmetic art,”3 Madame Yale lectured on cosmetics at the Chicago Opera House on March 17, 1892, arguing that they should be included among exhibits featuring female inventors. Yale complained volubly about the formidable Bertha Palmer, who, as the head of the board of Lady Managers at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, decided what did and did not belong in the Woman’s Building of that fair.

The logic of Madame Yale’s pro-cosmetics argument to feminists was inspired: “Training and skills being equal, the woman who looks better will get the job, so why not make the most of your appearance?”4 Mrs. Palmer was unswayed. She decreed that such nonsense was not worthy of the Woman’s Building. Harriet Hubbard Ayer also took up the pro-cosmetics mantle in a lengthy screed in her 1899 beauty book.

“I am always a bit amused when anathemas are hurled at the present use of cosmetics, particularly when a hopelessly-soured and pitilessly-unattractive female or a blatant, tobacco-smoking, spirituously-odorous male addresses me on the subject,” she fairly sputtered.5

Cosmetics were a neutral force, Ayer argued. “As a matter of actual fact, whatever one’s opinion may be as to the moral of the question, cosmetics have been used both by good and bad women as far back as we can learn anything of the personal customs of the sex, just as wine has been drunk by priests and sots, by gentlemen and cads, and will be used and abused so long as men and wine exist.”6 Women under the age of thirty who used cosmetics, as Ayer saw it, were painting the lily and gilding gold. But as a woman aged, she warned, “there are times in a woman’s life, when, if she be wise, she will attempt to repair the damage of years and care.”

“When a wife sees a haggard-looking ghost of herself reflected from her mirror, when perhaps she is painfully conscious that the eyes she loves best are turning from her faded beauty to a less worthy object, then I think she is not only justified in delicately simulating, by every aid known to cosmetic art, the charms she has lost, but she is stupid not to do so. It is the plain, unadorned, weary and too natural woman whose husband invariably falls a victim to the wiles of a Delilah, or succumbs to the artificial charms of a Jezebel. The very man who will almost fall in a fit at the sight of toilet powder in his wife’s dressing room, will break her heart and waste his substance in the worship of a peroxide or regenerator Titian-red blonde.

“Let a premium be placed on sallow-faced, pale-lipped, dull, thin-haired women in the devotion and loyalty of the other sex, and the trade of the cosmetic artist will soon become a matter of ancient history.”7

A Mirror with a Memory

As photography steadily became more popular, from 1870 to 1900, so too did cosmetics. An amateur photographer of the time referred to photographs as “permanent mirrors,”8 while Oliver Wendell Holmes, upon viewing Mathew Brady’s photographs of Civil War battlefields, called the camera a “mirror with a memory.”9 Increasingly, sitters insisted that their images be improved upon for the special occasion of a portrait. Enameling—lacquering the face with white paint— therefore came into vogue. “American women who ordinarily shunned paint requested it at photographers’ studios,” according to historian Kathy Peiss.10 H. J. Rodgers, in his 1872 manual of photography, advised women not just on what clothing was most flattering in a portrait but also provided them with many pages of cosmetic recipes. Clearly, women took advantage of such concoctions, as the photographs themselves attest. In a series of portraits from the 1880s, for example, Baby Doe Tabor, who married a silver magnate in the Colorado town of Leadville, displays eyebrows unapologetically darkened by artificial means. Stage actress Charlotte “Lottie” Mignon Crabtree unabashedly wore kohl on her eyes (and rouge on her lips) in the carte de visites she passed out liberally to her fans. Photographer Henry Peach Robinson lamented the vanity of his clients. “All kinds of powders and cosmetics were brought into play,” he said, “until sitters did not think they were being properly treated if their faces and hair were not powdered until they looked like a ghastly mockery of the clown in a pantomime.”11

Those who did not have the foresight to spackle their faces beforehand often insisted that their portraits be enhanced after the fact by hand-tinting or other sleight of hand.

Around 1870 one New York cosmetics boutique sold thirteen different kinds of powder and twenty types of rouge. Fashionable women carried a Lady’s Pocket Companion, or Portable Complection, which discretely held rouge, powder, an eyebrow pencil, and a bottle of india ink. Altman’s department store featured a “makingup” department.12

In the 1880s cosmetics were beginning to receive celebrity endorsements from the likes of Lillie Langtry, the voluptuous British stage actress who epitomized beauty during that era. By the 1890s ordinary women, not just those who made their living on the stage, were increasingly interested in painting their faces. During that decade the Baltimore Sun published more than a dozen letters each week from women seeking answers to beauty questions ranging from how to lighten freckles to how to darken eyebrows.

Certain enhancements were considered legitimate. Pale lashes on natural blonds, for example, were viewed almost as a birth defect. “White lashes and brows are so disagreeably suggestive that one cannot help but pardon their unfortunate possessor for wanting to disguise them by a harmless device,” writes Sarah Jane Pierce in Homely Girls. “A decoction of walnut hulls should be made in the right season and bottled. Applied to the brows and lashes with a fine hair pencil will turn them to a rich brown, which will harmonize well with fair hair.”13

Max Beerbohm, then an undergraduate at Oxford, chimed in with his support, albeit facetiously, for the pro-cosmetics brigade. In April 1894 he wrote an article entitled “A Defence of Cosmetics”:

“No longer is a lady of fashion blamed if, to escape the outrageous persecution of time, she fly for sanctuary to the toilet-table; and if a damosel, prying in her mirror, be sure that with brush and pigment she can trick herself into more charm, we are not angry. Indeed, why should we ever have been? Surely it is laudable, this wish to make fair the ugly and overtop fairness, and no wonder that within the last five years the trade of the makers of cosmetics has increased immoderately—twenty-fold, so one of these makers has said to me.”

Many a husband, suddenly realizing that his wife was painted, alleged Beerbohm in his spoof, “bade her sternly, ‘Go up and take it all off,’ and, on her reappearance, bade her with increasing sternness, ‘Go up and put it all on again.’ ”

While cosmetics had long been made at home or specially ordered from the apothecary and applied on the sly, by the 1910s the tide began to turn in favor of public acceptance of cosmetics.

In Europe, Diaghilev’s London ballet production of Shéhérazade in 1909 sent sales of mascara and eye shadow rocketing upward. The Russian dancers’ dramatic eye makeup stepped up the demand for kohl—at least for the privileged classes—and also started the fad of colored and gilded eye shadows that color-coordinated with daring evening dresses designed by the likes of Paul Poiret, an eccentric French dressmaker who, according to beauty entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein in her autobiography, used to receive his guests with “live panthers chained in the entrance hall, each one attended by a six-foot Negro stripped to the waist, a bejeweled turban wound around his head, and his bare torso oiled and gleaming to resemble statuary.”14

Dancers had a big influence on American doyennes of beauty like Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden. Both women recall in their memoirs having been struck by the eye makeup used by the Russian ballerinas and other dancers. Arden and Rubinstein persuaded their wealthy clientele to play with these bold eye cosmetics. “I experimented privately and learned many valuable lessons from stage personalities, which in turn I taught to a few of my more daring clients,” Rubinstein wrote in her autobiography. “They spread the word, and I knew that another beauty barrier would soon be toppled.”15 By the end ofWorld War I, “mascaro,” the hair dye, had evolved into “mascara,” a cosmetic used specifically and routinely by many women—at least in the big metropolises.

Sticky Lashes The most daring clientele, and the most influential, were movie actresses. Their expressively painted faces were of paramount importance on the big screen— to the exclusion, at least in the beginning, of breasts or buttocks or legs. Theda Bara and Pola Negri, smoldering vamps of the silent screen, were especially daring with eye makeup. Rubinstein fashioned a special kohl to dramatize Bara’s face, producing her trademark raccoon eyes, which Bara wore not just to work but also about town.

In 1917, when Bara asked Helena Rubinstein to find a way to emphasize her eyes, Rubinstein made the eyes dominate her face. “The effect was tremendously dramatic,” wrote Rubinstein later. “It was a sensation reported in every newspaper and magazine—only less of a sensation than when Theda Bara first painted her toenails!”16

In the 1920s, Max Factor worked on Theda Bara as well as many other actresses, including Clara Bow. Factor, a Russian émigré who started out as a wigmaker, introduced many innovations as he built a family cosmetics empire in Hollywood. His approach was to “bead” the lashes with his own special concoction. Factor’s Cosmetic (pronounced with a French affect, as “cosmetique”) was a waxy, waterproof preparation that came in foil-wrapped tubes the shape and size of a roll of breath mints today. The makeup artist or actor would slice off a small chunk and hold it over a flame until it melted. Then he or she would dip an orange stick into the gooey Cosmetic. It could either be applied to the lashes in upward strokes or applied to the tips of two or three lashes, which would be held together until they stuck, giving the lashes a thick appearance.

When Factor first applied his Cosmetic on Clara Bow, according to company lore, she panicked at the end of the day when her lids started sticking together. Someone tracked down Max Factor, who showed Bow how to use cold cream to remove the waxy goo. She reportedly became a “devoted Cosmetic user” thereafter.17 Other new weapons were popping up in the eye-enhancement arsenal. Kurlash, the first eyelash curling device, was invented in 1923. It was hard to use, cost a hefty five dollars, and it took ten minutes just to get the lashes of one eye curled. It was a huge success.

The eyebrow pencil really took off in the 1920s, in part because it was technologically superior to what it had been, due to a new ingredient: hydrogenated cottonseed oil (also the key constituent of another wonder product of that era, Crisco Oil). This likely helped the pencil glide more easily and, just as important, kept it from “blooming” with bacteria.

Greta Garbo wielded the eyebrow pencil skillfully and in doing so transformed the face of America. When she arrived in Hollywood, Garbo was an “unretouched Swedish dumpling” who had “the shadow of a double chin, frizzy hair, and slightly buck teeth.”18

Louise Brooks was struck when she met Garbo by “the perfection of her features and the petal loveliness of her skin”19 as well as her translucent gray-blue eyes. But these are not features that the audience of her black-and-white screen performances could appreciate. Moreover, though her real eyelashes were quite lush—Tallulah Bankhead reportedly pulled them once to make sure—they were quite blond and thus would have been nearly invisible without mascara.

“If she only knew it, her best disguise would be to use no mascara,” said costar Nils Asther of his famously reclusive friend. “Her eyebrows and eyelashes are almost white, and without mascara she looks like a different person.”20

So influential was Garbo’s look that other actresses imitated her, prompting Vogue to feature a half-dozen photos of popular actresses, noting their Garbo-ization. “Post-Garbo, they wear [what appeared to be] minimal make-up, their hair is straight, their eyebrows thick, their cheeks sucked in, and their expressions uniformly languorous and inscrutable, as if they were brooding over some abiding sorrow,” said John Bainbridge. “Perhaps they are only brooding over their inability to look even more like Garbo.”21 Her use of cosmetics “completely altered the face of the fashionable woman,” wrote Cecil Beaton in The Glass of Fashion.22

Maria Riva, in a biography of her own mother, Marlene Dietrich, beautifully evokes the transformation that actresses underwent in the studio makeup department during that era: “The smell of greasepaint, fresh coffee, and Danish pastry, the big Make-Up Department all garish light, famous faces naked, devoid of adornment, some tired, half awake, all imperfections showing—terribly human, somehow vulnerable— awaiting the application of their masks of painted perfection. Hair-Dressing, equally lit, equally exposing the normalcy of flat-haired goddesses and some slightly balding gods, the sweet, sticky smell of setting lotion and hair glue replacing the linseed oil of greasepaint, the perfume of coffee and Danish. My mother becoming one of the crowd, an astounding revelation to me, who believed she was unique, the only one of her kind. Watching as she pushed skilled hands away, took over the task of doing her own face, drawing a fine line of lighter shade than her base, down the center of her nose, dipping the rounded end of a thin hairpin into white greasepaint, lining the inside of her lower eyelid. Looking at her in the big bulb-festooned mirror, seeing that suddenly straightened nose, those now oversized eyes, and coming all the way back to my original concept: that yes . . . she was, after all, truly unique.”23

Actresses who were endowed with great acting talent but not necessarily great beauty remade their faces into glamorous facades. Bette Davis, whose face was less than symmetrical, capitalized, with the help of mascara, on her most attractive feature: her eyes. Jean Harlow’s platinum-blond hair made her heavily painted eyes and bright Cupid’s bow mouth stand out in deep relief, thereby drawing attention away from her too-broad nose.

The Garbo-ization of America

Millions of American women sought to be unique in the same way, imitating Hollywood goddesses like Garbo and Dietrich (who, according to Jane Gordon’s Technique for Beauty, never darkened her lower eyelashes in the belief that this cast an unbecoming shadow). Fan magazines, beauty columns featuring makeup tips from stars, as well as actress-endorsed product advertisements cultivated this urge. Bruce Bliven, writing in The New Republic in 1925, reported that the “flapper” was already passé and had been replaced by a new creature, this one completely beholden to cosmetics. “She is frankly heavily made up, not to imitate nature, but for an altogether artificial effect—pallor mortis, poisonously scarlet lips, richly ringed eyes—the latter looking not so much debauched (which is the intention) as diabetic.”24 Not only was the average woman seeing more and more images of stars she wanted to emulate. She also saw more and more of herself as she really was. Thanks to advances in glass production and silvering processes, mirrors by the turn of the century were becoming increasingly available to the masses.

Businesses gave away oval pocket mirrors to advertise everything from Coca- Cola to cures for indigestion. “Once a luxury of the rich,” writes Mark Pendergrast in Mirror, Mirror, now “mirrors were everywhere.”25Women peered into these mirrors on a regular basis, and the mirrors ably assisted them in conjuring their own glamorous facades with cosmetics.

Moreover, the snapshot had become ubiquitous. In 1888, George Eastman had introduced his Kodak “detective camera” (called that because, in contrast to the large, old, unwieldy box cameras, it enabled the photographer to take the picture surreptitiously). Although personal Brownie cameras had been around since 1900, amateur photographers were now documenting everyday life as never before. Candid cameras proliferated.

Picture magazines abounded, “led by the more dignified Life and the less dignified Look.”26 Between 1935 and 1937 camera sales went from less than $5 million annually to nearly $12.5 million. Moreover, photographers, whether professionals like Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange or simply weekend amateurs, now eschewed the blurred, sentimental point of view from earlier decades and instead became clear-eyed chroniclers of social life. Women were seeing more and more of themselves captured in these permanent mirrors and more and more they decided to modify their images with cosmetics.

Crocodile Dung and Asses’ Liver Of course, mascara is essentially a cosmetic that has been used by different cultures for millennia. The substance broadly referred to as kohl, used to darken lashes, lids, and brows, was made from a number of materials. In ancient Egypt, “there was a choice to be made in eyebrow dye,” Richard Corson informs us, crocodile earth mixed with honey dissolved in onion water or “asses’ liver warmed in oil with opium and made into little balls.”27 But kohl also has been made of malachite, galena, copper, iron, manganese, and lead.

The coloring material was ground with a stone slab or palette and then stored in a container: a shell, a hollow reed, or a small alabaster vase. Then it was probably mixed with fat or oil or applied on top of a base of ointment with a special stick. These handy little sticks—made of ivory, bone, wood, hematite, glass, or bronze— were thick at one end and flat at the other so they could be used not only for mixing the material but also for extracting and applying it.

Even the Kama Sutra, the ancient Indian treatise on love and sexual pleasure, offers a recipe for mascara, which sounds like a close cousin to some of those used by nineteenth-century American women.

Lampblack was evidently favored by fashionable but thrifty ladies since it could be made for virtually nothing at home. “By holding a saucer over the flame of a lamp or candle enough ‘lamp black’ could be collected for applying to the lashes with a camel-hair brush,” wrote the anonymous author of an 1834 beauty book, the Toilette of Health.28 Moreover, the book suggested, lampblack was far more suitable for shading the eyebrows than apothecary-shop pencils—those “too voyant aids to beauty,” which apparently had an unfortunate tendency to make the hairs fall out. This exhaustive tome lays out other options for achieving that Cleopatra look: rubbing in coconut oil, dying the lashes with the juice of elderberries, or coating them with burnt cork or cloves. Possibly the best preparations, according to the Toilette of Health, employed the black of frankincense, resin, and mastic—apparently a precursor to waterproof mascara. “This black, it is said, will not come off with perspiration.” These methods were all recommended over the previous belief that “the length and silkiness of the lashes ‘may occasionally be promoted by topping them with a pair of sharp scissors’—a practice most effective when commenced in early childhood.”29 Mabel ’s Gift to the Masses

Although Hollywood cosmetics like Max Factor’s Cosmetic were not a reasonable embellishment for the average woman, capitalists responded nimbly to the Hollywood-inspired increase in demand for mascara with standardized products more appropriate for the masses. No longer did a woman have to special order from her apothecary or steam over a candle trying to produce lampblack.

Maybelline trumpeted its mail-order mascara-for-the-masses in movie and confession magazines as well as Sunday newspaper supplements. According to the Maybelline Company, T. L. Williams introduced Maybelline cake mascara in 1917 as the “first modern eye cosmetic produced for everyday use.”30Williams was inspired by his younger sister Mabel (in whose honor the company was named), who like other young girls used petroleum jelly—which had been used for this purpose virtually ever since it was invented in 1878—to plump up her eyelashes and first gave him the idea for the company. By the 1930s, Maybelline mascara was available at the local five-and-dime store for ten cents a cake.

Men seemed blithely unaware of the modifications. A national survey of undergraduates in 1936 by Vogue magazine found that men were disapproving of makeup that was obviously applied. “Practically 100 percent no. How they hate it! They want to be fooled by artificial aids to beauty—never to be made aware of them.”31

By contrast, a survey that same year of 1,012 female readers by the Woman’s Home Companion found that sixty-two percent regularly used mascara, with Maybelline being the preferred brand. While one might expect that the appetite for frivolities dipped during the Depression, quite the opposite was true. This was an era of cheap novelty that spawned an “utterly fantastic epidemic of tree-sitting”32 as well as the invention of pinball, bingo, and, for those who could no longer afford the real thing, miniature golf. Cosmetics were an affordable luxury—or, as some job-seeking women saw it, a necessity. As the Depression deepened, cosmetic sales climbed steadily. “Even in these days of pinch-penny economy women are not running around with wan cheeks and shiny noses,” wrote G. W. Vanden in an article entitled “It’s Cosmetic Time in America.” “WOMEN ARE NOT GOING WITHOUT COSMETICS, even if it takes the last spare change from their pocketbooks to buy. It is up to the beauty shops to get their share of this tremendously profitable business.”33

Dye-ing to Be Beautiful

The early commercial mascaras, like Maybelline, were simply pressed cakes containing soap and pigments. A woman would dip a tiny brush into hot water, rub the bristles on the cake, remove the excess by rolling the brush onto some blotting paper or a sponge, and then apply the mascara as if her eyelashes were a watercolor canvas.

Next came cream mascara in a tube, one version sold by a company called Tattoo. A little cream would be squeezed onto a brush and then applied to the lashes. This required a more artful hand than the pressed-cake version but some women preferred it because it tended not to dry out lashes. Another popular “cream” mascara was Laleek Longlash, essentially a tinted Vaseline that came in several shades. Liquid mascara, prized because it did not rub off so easily, could be applied only by those with a truly steady hand. In 1938, Helene Vierthaler Winterstein—a dancer and actress in Vienna, Austria—patented what she claimed to be the first waterproof mascara. Alas, it was fifty percent turpentine, so that while it was fastdrying it stank terribly while being applied and caused allergic reactions in some women.

In any form, however, mascara was an awkward proposition. If a woman applied too much mascara, she would end up with clumpy stalactites dripping from her eyes. Too little and she might as well not have made the effort at all. Clearly, this was an enterprise that could be undertaken only in close proximity to a vanity table. Adding a new coat of mascara while out in public, unlike nose powdering and lipstick freshening, was potentially dangerous to one’s beauty.

Given the state of mascara technology, we can sympathize with one socially prominent blue-eyed brunette living in a Midwestern city. On the morning of May 17, 1933, she stopped by Byrd’s Beauty Shoppe to get a shampoo and a haircut in anticipation of a banquet that evening, where she was being honored for her volunteer work in the local Parent Teachers Association. Since she wanted to look her best, “Mrs. Brown,” as she would later be referred to in a congressional hearing, let herself be talked into having her eyelashes and brows dyed. The procedure turned out to be a messier, lengthier procedure than Mrs. Brown had anticipated. While Mrs. Brown drove home, her eyes began to sting. It probably did not help matters that she then proceeded to apply a variety of ointments— first boric acid, then a concoction made up fresh for her by her druggist, and then yellow oxide of mercury. Even though she was the guest of honor, her extreme discomfort forced her to leave the banquet early. By the morning, her eyes, which had developed ulcers, were swollen shut and oozing. Mrs. Brown’s eyes were so badly ulcerated that they sloughed off their own corneas. We know this because Mrs. Brown’s weekslong nightmare was dryly chronicled at the time in appalling detail by the attending nurse in her notes. “Mrs. Brown’s laughing blue eyes have been blinded forever,”34 Ruth deForest Lamb wrote in her American Chamber of Horrors, a 1936 book detailing a number of horrific products consumed by the American public in the name of beauty (including the depilatory Koremlu as well as mercury-based skin “whiteners”).

What eyelash dye so devastated Mrs. Brown? Lash Lure, a synthetic aniline dye belonging to the paraphenylenediamine group and produced by the Lash Lure Laboratories, Incorporated, of Los Angeles. Lash Lure was run as a sideline by Sanford M. Kolmetz, an entrepreneur who also ran the National Permanent Wave Company; his brother-in-law, Isaac Dellar, a graduate of the University of Oregon Medical School; and George Eilert, proprietor of the Lilac Beauty Parlor Supply Company. The three pooled together less than $1,000 to start their business. Since there were no Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations regarding testing of new cosmetics at that time, the product jumped right into sales.

Lash Lure was not an unreasonable leap, given what was known at the time. Aniline had been used as a commercial dye since the London World Exhibition of 1862, where one exhibitor showed a slab of the stuff that was twenty inches high and nine inches in diameter. The exhibitor boasted that this one small chunk, which had been produced from two thousand tons of coal tar, was sufficient to dye three hundred miles of silk. From the late 1800s, aniline also would be used as a key ingredient in hair dye. While these hair dyes were health-endangering, their effects were not so immediate as were those of Lash Lure. (Indeed, their ill effects would not be truly understood until much later in the twentieth century.) This seems largely due to the fact that Lash Lure was applied near the eyes, certainly the most sensitive external surface of the body.

Congress, urged on by Lamb’s book and after numerous chest-thumping congressional hearings, finally acted to regulate cosmetics in 1938. But the controversy over such products as Lash Lure was widely publicized long before then. As early as 1931 and 1932, The New Republic published a series of essays on the dangers of unregulated cosmetics. And the American Medical Association published an article identifying fifteen other cases of blindness and one death attributed to Lash Lure. The mystery is not simply why it took Congress so long to empower the federal government to yank Lash Lure off the market, but also why women continued to use it (as well as several imitators) even when they were being told again and again by the press and consumer advocates that the stuff was potentially disfiguring. Women were not the only targets of such entrepreneurial zest in this paleoregulatory era. Between 1925 and 1930, men quaffed more than 400,000 bottles of Radithor, radiumlaced water that was said to restore one’s virility. One sip and “immediately the whole body is flooded with billions and billions of Alpha rays that liberate their energy throughout the entire system like floods of sunshine.”35 Eben M. Byers, a millionaire industrialist, drank cases of the stuff, and in 1932—the same year Mrs. Brown was mutilated by Lash Lure—he died a slow, painful, radium-induced death.

Audrey Hepburn and Synthetic Beauty It is easy to understand why in the 1920s and 1930s many inventors focused their creative efforts on the problem of applying mascara. What is startling from today’s24 viewpoint is the wide variety of their solutions, most of which appear absurd from the safe distance of seventy to eighty years. Many of these inventors, both male and female, lived in New York City or near Hollywood, though there were a few outlyers. In 1933, for example, Seattle resident Tosca Wagner (an inventor of operatic ambitions, no doubt) patented a mascara applicator that resembles a tweezers with itty-bitty brushes at the tips. The tweezers prototype also occurred to other inventors, one of whom attached sponges to the end of the device rather than brushes. But none of these inventions caught on for the long-term—and with good reason. None seems much more efficient than the kohl sticks used in ancient Egypt.

One patent, however, bears striking similarity to the modern-day mascara wand. It was granted in 1939 to Frank L. Engel Jr. of Chicago. If the nail polish bottle had as its precedent the glue pot, the mascara wand’s materfamilias is the shoeblacking bottle. The similarity both in function and form is striking. (Another daughter of the shoeblacking bottle is the instrument that gynecologists use to take Pap smear samples, but that’s another story altogether.)

The mascara wand did not make it to the commercial market until the late 1950s, more than two decades after Engel received his patent. Why did it take so long if it seemed to solve the problem of applying mascara?

With invention, as with most things, timing is everything. When Engel received his patent, the United States was about to enter World War II—a terribly inauspicious time for an aspiring entrepreneur of eligible draft age. Women had temporarily abandoned their eyes and were instead individually and collectively riffing on other themes: hips, lips, and, especially, breasts.

Until the mid-1950s, that is, when a new musical called Kismet opened at the Stoll Theatre in London, reigniting the eye rage. Doretta Morrow, the star of Kismet, wore two-inch-long false lashes and dusted her eyelids with ground golden glass. Moreover, she took to wearing such makeup during daytime hours when not on stage. “I feel unfinished without it,” she said.36

“More space has been devoted to the use of these eye-beauty preparations in women’s periodicals in the last three years than to any other single time of the toilet,” wrote Neville Williams in 1957. “The wheel of fashion has turned; the eyebrows have become thicker again; there is a steady sale of eyelash curlers, while make-up aims at giving a ‘long, gentle-eyed kitten-of-the-Nile look.’ ”37

Cosmetic makers responded nimbly to this surge in demand. In 1958, Helena Rubinstein introduced her Mascaramatic, which dispensed with the old-fashioned block mascara applied by brush and water. The size and shape of a fountain pen, it was immediately popular. (Conveniently, Engel’s patent for his very similar device had expired two years earlier.) A viscous liquid mascara pooled in a reservoir at one end of the “pen.” A slim applicator, whose tip was grooved metal, fit snugly inside. As the applicator was drawn out, it grabbed just enough mascara to coat the eyelashes without making them gloppy.

From that point on mascara-wand invention was fast and furious. The Italian cosmetics firm Debby and many others jumped into the competition and the technologically sounding Mascaramatic gave way to the more poetic “mascara wand.” Soon it featured a little brush at the tip rather than simply grooved metal. It was not just the mascara dispenser that was new, however; the basic recipe for mascara had changed, making it possible to easily apply the liquid version. During the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, industry was transmuting oil into a motherlode of new wonder synthetics. Researchers broke down natural petroleum into its constituent parts and put them back together in sophisticated new combinations that yielded polyesters and acrylics, polyethylenes and polypropylenes. This hive of experimentation also produced hydrocarbon solvents that ultimately were used in cosmetics. Unlike turpentine, these fast-drying solvents were odorless, seemingly hypoallergenic, and—waterproof. They also gave rise to a liquid version of the eyebrow pencil: eyeliner. In an era when cosmetic formulas were usually guarded as trade secrets, the oil company Esso patented a new mascara made with hydrocarbon solvents.

Of course, this new mascara wand was not without its drawbacks. The wand device itself encouraged fungal growth, and for the careless could result in accidental eye pricks. As for the formula, hydrocarbon solvents would later prove to be not as benign as they initially appeared. Still, by the late 1950s, most American women were experimenting with eye makeup as never before, greatly inspired by Audrey Hepburn’s dark doe eyes. In the 1957 Funny Face, Hepburn plays a brainiac bookstore employee infatuated with a nutty intellectual movement called Empathicalism. Initially dismissive of “synthetic beauty,” she goes on to become a chic Paris model flaunting her trademark Cleopatra eyes. The wheel of fashion was about to turn again, however. “Hand me my purse, will you, darling?” Hepburn famously said, playing Holly Golightly in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “A girl can’t read that sort of thing without her lipstick.”