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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 settlement in the New World through the turn of the nineteenth century, recipes for homemade depilatories were widespread, found throughout period cookery and etiquette manuals and passed from family member to family member and from neighbor to neighbor along with other domestic knowledge.⁹

A typical depilatory recipe appears in one of the most important English-language books on midwifery, The Byrth of Mankynde. First published in 1540, the book was reprinted numerous times over the subsequent century, influencing popular medicine across the American colonies. Along with other medical and domestic remedies, this “Woman’s Book” offered a detailed recipe for a homemade hair remover. “TO TAKE HAYRE FROM PLACES WHERE IT IS UNSEEMLY,” the recipe explained,

Take new burnt Lime foure ounces, of Arseneck an ounce, steepe both these in a pint of water the space of two days, and then boyle it in a pint to a half. And to prove whether it be perfect, dippe a feather therein, and if the plume of the feather depart off easily, then it is strong enough: with this water then anoint so farre the place yee would have bare from hayre, as it liketh you, and within a quarter of an houre pluck at the hayres and they will follow, and then wash that place much with water wherein Bran hath been steeped: and that done, anoint the place with the white of a new laid Egge and oyle Olive, beaten and mixt together with the juyce of Singrene or Purflaine, to allay the heat engendred of the fore-said lee.¹⁰

If women followed these elaborate instructions, those whose “hayre groweth so low in the foreheads and the temples, that it disfigureth them” might be saved.¹¹ Such colonial depilatory recipes were as varied as they were complex. One influential sixteenth-century formula suggested boiling liquor calcis (a lime solution), silver paint, and aromatic oil together, soaking a rag in the resulting compound, and applying it to the hairy skin.¹² A single seventeenth-century manual, Johann Jacob Wecker’s widely circulated book, Cosmeticks; or, The Beautifying Part of Physick, contained more than three-dozen recipes for ointments to hinder or remove hair.¹³ Others proposed applications of eggshells, vinegar, and cat’s dung, or thinning the eyebrows with a combination of ground ivy, gum, ant eggs, burnt leeches, and frog’s blood.¹⁴

These depilatories, part of larger traditions of folk medicine, merged English, French, and Spanish practices with Native American and African pharmacopeias in technically complicated ways.¹⁵ Although generally based on relatively simple raw materials such as spurge or acacia, hair-removing concoctions required considerable judgment and skill in their preparation, as suggested by the lengthy description in The Byrth of Mankinde.¹⁶ Some ingredients were highly combustible; others could lead to severe skin irritation or systemic poisoning for those who handled them carelessly.¹⁷ Like the production of homemade abortifacients, medicinal tinctures, and the countless other items produced in early American households, creating effective preparations for hair removal relied on considerable hands-on knowledge and skill.¹⁸

INDUSTRIAL CHANGE ERODED that expertise. To be sure, the shift from household to industrial production did not unfold along a single, uniform trajectory. Industrial change occurred piecemeal, varying from product to product and from nation to nation.¹⁹ Even solely within the United States, early industry took many forms. Some enterprises relied on water-powered machines, others on manual labor. Some focused on highly trained artisanal work, others on unskilled, specialized tasks. Some developed factories with dozens of employees; others remained in small shops. Some depended on enslaved workers, others on contract laborers supervised by managers. Some were financed by distant stockholders, others by capital from their on-site owners.²⁰

The production of depilatories reflected these uneven developments, as individual households, particularly those in New England and the mid-Atlantic, moved stutteringly into the exchange of goods produced by strangers. Yet where many other aspects of women’s domestic labor, such as cooking and cleaning, were mechanized late in the century or not at all, homemade depilatories already were facing pressure from prefabricated alternatives by the turn of the nineteenth century.²¹ Advertisements for ready-made powders and creams to “take off all superfluous hair” began appearing in U.S. newspapers and magazines as early as 1801; packaged depilatories were available to women in European towns and cities even earlier.²² Marketed primarily though not exclusively to women, the powders promised to alleviate “unsightly appendages” from upper lips, foreheads, temples, and brows. The white face, still thought to mirror inner moral and spiritual qualities, remained the focus of commercial attention.²³

While the precise composition of such products is unclear (and likely varied enormously from batch to batch when first produced), most would have worked in largely the same way: chemically softening or dissolving the hair so that it could be readily scraped or wiped from the surface of the skin. Some compositions, such as thallium compounds, produced a systemic toxicity that resulted in hair loss as well as nerve damage or death; arsenic compounds could produce vomiting, convulsions, coma, and death as well as hair loss. Twenty-first-century biochemists might explain that most depilatory compounds hydrolyze the disulfide bonds of keratin, the fibrous protein that makes up hair. Keratin’s sulfur-to-sulfur bonds, they would say, make hair strong and flexible; when those bonds are broken chemically, hair becomes weak and pliable enough to be wiped off with a cloth or putty knife, leaving the follicle intact. Makers of early depilatories, however, had no conception of disulfide bonds or hydrolyzing action. Depilatories predate the very word “keratin,” which the Oxford English Dictionary traces to an 1847 anatomical encyclopedia.²⁴

Although the precise chemical composition of the various hair removers was obscure even to producers, interest in such packaged depilatories grew rapidly, alongside urban markets. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, dozens of small manufacturers began to concoct special blends of hair removing powders or unguents, marketed under signature labels: Trent’s Depilatory, Hubert’s Roseate Powder, Dr. Gouraud’s Poudres Subtile. Colley’s Depilatory was said to entail a mixture of “quicklime and sulphuret of potass.” Devereux’s Depilatory Powder could be purchased wholesale in New York City. Dillingham and Bicknell offered a “Chinese Hair Eradicator and Depilatory Powder” to shoppers in Augusta, Maine.

The sale of these goods, like that of other patent remedies, established networks of marketing and distribution later followed by manufacturers of soaps, cigarettes, and other commodities.²⁵ In the antebellum period, the word “patent” was used to refer to any preparation whose availability was extended through advertising—whether or not it possessed an actual government patent. Patent hair removers were distributed through wholesalers like druggists (who ordered in bulk and redistributed material to middle men) and through the apothecaries, physicians, barbers, and perfumers who sold goods directly to users.²⁶ Antebellum circulars, catalogues, and advertisements indicate that numerous manufacturers of patent depilatories delivered their products to consumers through a variety of strategies. One crucial factor in the development of national markets in such commodities was their relative transportability, historian James Harvey Young has shown, as shipping costs for patent medicines represented a smaller proportion of their total price than of heavier, bulkier commodities.²⁷ Even before the development of the transnational highways and railways that expedited industrial growth, lightweight powders and pastes could be hauled by riverboat or railroad, by foot or horse-drawn wagon. Competing fiercely with one another, larger companies might have a dozen or more distributors on the road at one time, each covering a particular district. Such efforts appear to have been successful; by the end of the Civil War, few domestic manuals contained recipes for homemade depilatories. Those troubled by facial hair would turn instead to packaged compounds such as Trent’s, Devereux’s, and Gouraud’s.²⁸

Although impossible to quantify precisely, it is clear that markets in commercial depilatories never approached the scale of markets in, say, manufactured textiles, milled flour, or boots and shoes. In 1849, for instance, the value of all domestic toiletry manufactures (including but not limited to depilatories) came to about $355,000, while by 1850 cotton and woolen textile production totaled more than $65 million. Certainly the role played by commercial depilatories in directing the course of industrial manufacturing should not be overstated. Yet neither should these commodities’ influence on the course of American industry be underestimated. It is worth recalling that small-scale artisanal manufactories of the sort that produced depilatories remained the dominant mode of commodity production through the 1830s and 1840s. Even in Britain, the average textile factory employed fewer than one hundred people.²⁹ The increasing popularity of packaged hair removers in the 1810s and 1820s, like the gradual, uneven transfer of cloth production from the household treadle looms to the water-powered factories dotting the rivers of New England, signaled an emerging reliance on manufactured goods—one made possible through the application of new chemical and mechanical arts.

One of the leading products of the age, Atkinson’s depilatory, exemplifies these new goods.³⁰ Developed by an entrepreneur who billed himself as the “perfumer to the [British] Royal Family,” Atkinson’s was a mixture of one part ground orpiment (a common sulfide mineral), six parts quicklime, and a little flour.³¹ Generally applied to the face and neck, it was designed to remove “superfluous” hair, which advertisements routinely described as the greatest “blemish” a woman might possess. “This great disfigurement of female beauty,” one advertisement in the Liberator explained, “is effectually removed by this article, which is perfectly safe, and easily applied, and certain in its effects” (figure 2.1).³² Although appearing in newspapers with both black and white readers, Atkinson’s advertisements presumed that pale, hairless complexion was desired: one advertisement noted that the product would not merely remove “superfluous Hair” but also leave “the skin soft and whiter than before the application.”³³

Atkinson’s was also representative in another way: the manufacturers of packaged depilatories appear to have been mostly men, despite women’s longstanding proficiency with homemade hair removers. This fact is remarkable: more generally, the manufacture of cosmetics in early-nineteenth-century America provided uncommon opportunities for women entrepreneurs, prospects unavailable in more guild-oriented, male-dominated occupations such as hairdressing, wig making, and barbering.³⁴ By the second half of the nineteenth century, some women entrepreneurs were moving to the forefront of American cosmetics production, including Ellen Demorest (born in 1824), Madam C. J. Walker (1867), Helena Rubenstein (1870), and Elizabeth Arden (1884).³⁵ Little evidence suggests, however, that women were similarly involved in the production or marketing of the packaged depilatories circulating in antebellum America.³⁶

The relative paucity of women making and selling packaged depilatories points to the products’ unusual position at the confluence of folk medicine and newly centralized meat production—a domain of industry heavily dominated by men. Throughout the eighteenth century, when city dwellers accounted for only a small fraction of the nation’s population, most Americans reared and slaughtered their own animals. In the first federal census of 1790, there were only twenty-four cities in the country, and only two of those cities had populations exceeding 25,000. By 1840, however, the percentage of Americans living in cities had more than doubled, the number of cities had jumped to 131, and the population of New York City alone exceeded 250,000.³⁷ As settlements expanded and became too crowded for individuals or families to rear their own livestock, centralized stockyards and slaughterhouses grew accordingly, further segregating humans from other domesticated animals.

Figure 2.1. An 1840 advertisement for Atkinson’s depilatory in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.

The expansion of centralized meat production spawned new investment in hair removal. Killing itself was not the tricky part of mass meat production; prior to the advent of mechanized refrigeration, the more complicated issue was distributing the meat as quickly as possible once the animal was dead. Focus thus turned to the problem of securing efficient, uninterrupted dismemberment. A giant moving chain, from which dead pigs were hung, conveyed the highly perishable animal through a “disassembly” line—credited by Henry Ford as an inspiration for his continuous factory production line. As with automobile assembly, the complex work of dismantling a large animal was divided into minute tasks, each performed by a single worker: repetitively chopping, breaking, stripping, packing. To the goal of efficient, uninterrupted disassembly, the task of stripping hair from hides presented a vexing bottleneck.³⁸

Prior to the mechanization of slaughter, individual animal hides were stripped of hair through a gory and laborious manual process. Skins, covered with soil and blood, generally would be scrubbed clean of residual animal flesh. Hair was then softened and loosened by soaking the skin in urine, lime, or salt, and then scraped clean—“scudded”—by hand. To complete the transition from rawhide to imperishable leather, the skin would be pounded and kneaded, often with dung used as an emollient, and then stretched and dried.³⁹ Foul-smelling from the combination of urine, feces, and decomposing flesh, these tanning operations were generally confined to the outskirts of town near moving water where waste could be dumped. With the increase in animal processing made possible by systematic disassembly, industrialists experimented with faster, less labor-intensive techniques of “unhairing” (figure 2.2). Scores of inventors sought new methods for expediting the process of transforming a living animal to its exchangeable and constitutive parts. As with the introduction of overhead conveyer chains in the disassembly process, experimenters sought to substitute nonhuman labor for human manual work.⁴⁰

Where hair was concerned, many of the most effective labor-saving arts turned out to be chemical, as the influential industrial philosopher Andrew Ure noted in his widely read dictionary of mechanical arts.⁴¹ Adapting techniques of hair removal reaching back centuries, inventors scaled up the conversion of hairy living animals into meat, leather, and wool, deepening knowledge of industrial chemistry in the process. Alkalis such as lime (calcium hydroxide) and soda ash (sodium carbonate) were most common, but various combinations of sulfides, cyanides, and amines were also developed to help weaken and strip hair.⁴² Public waters became a convenient receptacle for chemically pulped hair, with damaging results. The degraded hair released noxious ammonia odors, a stench intensified by the sulfides used in unhairing. Because loose hair and caked lime tended to coat pipes and clog drainages, the effect on waterways was magnified.⁴³ Although toxic, the success of the novel chemical techniques was palpable: by 1830, according to one agricultural journal, the domestic manufacture of hides and skin was worth at least $30 million per year—more than $3.5 million more than total cotton exports from the United States.⁴⁴

Figure 2.2. Dehiding pigs by scalding. The rise of mass meat production prodded innovation in chemical hair removal. (From Douglas’s Encyclopedia [1902].)

EXISTING SOURCES DO not reveal the precise scope or direction of influence among what might now be considered “cosmetic,” “medical,” and “agricultural” applications of these industrial chemicals. Whether innovations in beautification drove agricultural applications or the other way around remains uncertain. What is clear is that the same technical knowledge that advanced mass animal processing circulated among antebellum toiletry manufacturers: compounds found to help remove hair from hogs might also strip hair from “the human skin,” as Andrew Ure put it, and vice versa.⁴⁵ One representative technical manual, The Art of Perfumery, proposed that the same chemical depilatory designed for “ladies” who consider hair on the upper lip “detrimental to beauty” would work equally well for “tanners and fellmongers” preparing hides and skins.⁴⁶

Quite unlike the bovine and porcine hair removal conducted in large, centralized abattoirs, however, human depilatory use was geographically dispersed. Antebellum women’s hair removal remained confined to the isolation of the private home or physician’s office, where the noxious smells of sulfide and ammonia and the mess of pulped hair were generally hidden from the wider public. Visible injuries resulting from the use of caustic depilatories, on the other hand, were not so easily veiled. As a result, concern about changing arts of human hair removal focused not on noxious odors or water contamination but on their more immediate risk to the complexion.⁴⁷

Numerous commentators worried that solvents “energetic” enough to penetrate and destroy the roots of hair could also be dangerous to women’s skin. (Fellmongers had related worries, as “injurious” chemical depilatories threatened to reduce the 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 special explanatory footnote to Kulsūm’s brief reference to núra. “In eastern countries,” Atkinson notes, “the hair under the arms, &c is always removed. Núra is quick lime, or a composition made of it with arsenic, for taking out hairs by the roots.” Atkinson’s translation also included Kulsūm’s report that it was improper for a young girl to use the depilatory, or for a woman to apply it with her own hands, so that “[w]hen women wish to use the núra, they must request a female friend to rub it on.”⁶⁵ Other writers similarly highlighted the languorous depilation practiced in the Oriental bath. Richard Burton’s annotated translation of Arabian Nights similarly lingered over the use of depilatories, as did Edward Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and Alexander Russell’s Natural History of Aleppo.⁶⁶ An essay in the London literary journal The Casket featured an account of a “depilatory pomatum” languidly applied to the body; the visitor to the bath was then carefully washed and scrubbed, wrapped in hot linen, and conducted through winding hallways back out of the inner chambers.⁶⁷ Andrew Ure described a similar “oriental rusma” in his industrial dictionary, stressing that the pomade “yields to nothing in depilatory power”⁶⁸ (figure 2.3).

It is difficult to ascertain how influential these depictions may have been in shifting habits in the United States. Certainly no evidence indicates that recurrent references to “Oriental” depilatories led women to remove hair from previously undepilated areas of the body. Yet many if not most commercial depilatory powders and creams, like Gouraud’s, alluded to the “Eastern” or “Oriental” origins of their products. These marketing descriptions, along with travelers’ and journalists’ sensual descriptions of núra and rusma, proliferated just as the production of depilatories was being relocated from home to factory. In fact, such imaginations of the Orient—seductive, mysterious, and potentially dangerous—gained force as economic activity (like meat production) came increasingly under the practical strictures of factory time. To readers confronting the repetitive piecework and tedious clock time required by industrial manufacturing, images of indulgent Turkish baths filled with unguents probably shimmered with temptation. In their allusions to the mysteries of the Orient, advertisers hinted at access to “spiritual or vital qualities as yet uncontaminated by ‘modern’ Western thoughts, processes, and values.”⁶⁹ So, too, the timeless quality of depictions of Eastern baths may have allowed consumers anxious about packaged compounds to believe that they were made from ancient, well-tested wisdom rather than novel, potentially harmful industrial chemicals. The popularity of references to “Oriental” hair removers in the antebellum period, just as the production of such bodily goods was being relocated from home to factory, suggests this kind of symbolic mediation. Discussions of núra and rusma helped affix an exotic, preindustrial aura to new manufactured goods.⁷⁰

Figure 2.3. The Turkish Bath by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1862), suggesting Western fascination with “Oriental” depilatory practices. (Courtesy Musée du Louvre.)

Indeed, some critics worried that advertisers’ mystified images of the Orient were acting to obscure awareness of the potentially injurious effects of depilatory chemicals. The Workingman’s Advocate complained as much in 1830: “[U]nsuspecting delicate females” find themselves “lulled into the belief that these [arsenic and pearl-white depilatories] are harmless, because they are graced by pretty names, Oriental, Itilian [sic], or French.” But in truth, such “chemicals of the toilette . . . very materially assist the messenger of death. There is scarce a cosmetic that is not a deleterious and destructive poison.”⁷¹ Another strong critique of commercial preparations concluded that women would be better off consulting recipe manuals and making their own toiletries, which would “certainly be more safe, and we believe far more beneficial than the patent nostrums.”⁷² Likewise, the 1834 Toilette of Health, Beauty, and Fashion recommended homemade compounds of parsley water, acacia juice, and gum of ivy, or milk thistle mixed with oil.⁷³ Andrew Ure recommended tempering the “causticity” of store-bought hair-removing pomades by adding a bit of “starch or rye flour” from the kitchen.⁷⁴

Such advice points to an ambivalent process of accommodation, as Americans shifted from using familiar, handcrafted preparations to purchasing commodities produced at a distance. Ambivalence is understandable, as the market revolution at once expanded the array of available off-the-shelf goods and rendered purchasers newly vulnerable to obscure and unregulated processes of production. While the shift from homemade depilatories to those concocted at remote perfumeries was surely one of the more modest features of the nation’s turbulent transition from agrarianism to industrial manufacturing, it did require an uncommonly visceral absorption of that larger sea change: applying the products of industry directly to one’s face. In this sense, the seeming banality of hair removal helped veiled the significance of the transformation: women’s active incorporation of an emerging economic system. Like other elements of daily life, care of the body was entwined in a strange new industrial order.⁷⁵