Book review: Beautiful For Ever
THE marketing of cosmetics has always relied on mystique: will Madam have a little distilled corpse of baby raven mixed with her myrtle leaves, or perhaps a dash of pro-retinol lipohydratics? No wonder the art was originally associated with witchcraft, and a law of 1770 allowed for the annulment of marriages that had been contracted under the influence of "scents, paints, false hair or bolstered hips".
Few cosmeticians have been as unscrupulous as "Madame Rachel of Bond Street", a former fish-fryer and part-time procuress named Sarah Levison, who in the late 1850s turned to the manufacture and sale of beauty products aimed exclusively at the top of the market. Her coup was to invent a process called "enamelling", the details of which she never divulged, but which promised to make its recipients Beautiful For Ever. One of her assistants said the compound resembled whitewash, and Punch called it "Stucco for the Softer Sex", but the lure of a cripplingly expensive treatment to arrest ageing proved irresistible to many women, as Helen Rappaport reveals.
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Hide AdNone could have been a softer target than Mary Tucker Borradaile, a middle-aged widow whom Madame Rachel persuaded was the object of a peer's affections, providing a series of semi-literate love letters to prove it. Madame Rachel also let some of her lady clients use the Mayfair shop for assignations and may have been providing them with gentlemen friends and abortions. It was clearly this side of the business that made her so phenomenally rich.
Madame Rachel was vilified by the press when Mrs Borradaile took her to court for extortion, but the trial collapsed in a fog of bewilderment at the vanity and idiocy of the defendant, and of the female sex in general. Other trials followed, and Rachel served time in prison, but her business thrived, serving as a model for entrepreneurs: great catchphrase, great cachet and great marketing..