The Beauty Myth (16 page)

The shopper probably gives in, and accepts the cosmetic range as her personal savior. Once back in the street, though, the expensive tubes and bottles immediately lose their aura. Those who have escaped from cults feel afterward that they have emerged from something they can only dimly remember.

Advertisements in print must now approach the potential cult member with more sophistication. For two decades they have used a mysterious language the way Catholicism uses Latin, Judaism Hebrew, and Masons secret passwords: as a prestigious Logos that confers magic power on the originators of it. To the lay person, it is a gibberish of science and mock-science. For example: “Phytolyastil,” “Phytophyline,” “Plurisome
^TM
”; “SEI Complex” and “biologically active tissue peptides LMP” (La Prairie); “hygrascopic elements and natural ceramides” (Chanel); “a syntropic blend of the unique Bio-Dermia
^TM
”; “Complex #3” “Reticulin and mucopolysaccharides” (Aloegen); “Tropocollagen and hyaluronic acid” (Charles of the Ritz); “Incellate
^TM
” (Terme di
Saturnia); “Glycosphingolipids” (GSL, Glycel); “Niosomes and Microsomes and Protectinol” (Shiseido).

“Western societies from the early centuries of the second millennium,” writes Rosalind Miles, “all found their own techniques for ensuring that the ‘new learning’ did not penetrate the great under-class of the female sex.” A long history of intellectual exclusion precedes our current intimidation by this battery of mock-authoritative language.

The ads refined this daunting nonsense language to cover the fact that skin creams do not actually do anything. The holy oil industry is a megalith that for forty years has been selling women nothing at all. According to Gerald McKnight’s exposé, the industry is “little more than a massive con . . . a sweetly disguised form of commercial robbery” with profit margins of over 50 percent on a revenue of 20
billion
dollars worldwide; in 1988 skin care grossed 3 billion in the United States alone, 337 million pounds in the United Kingdom, 8.9 trillion lire in Italy, and 69.2 million guilders in the Netherlands, up from 18.3 million in 1978.

For forty years the industry has been making impossible claims. Before 1987, the Food and Drug Administration just twice made minor objections. In the past two decades, holy oil makers went beyond the outrageous, claiming to retard aging (Revlon Anti-Aging Firmagel), repair the skin (Night Repair), and restructure the cell (Cellular Recovery Complex, G. M. Collin Intensive Cellular Regeneration, Elancyl Restructurant). As women encountered the computerized work force of the 1980s, the ads abandoned the filmy florals of “hope in a bottle” and adopted new imagery of ersatz technology, graphs and statistics, to resonate with the authority of the microchip. Imaginary technological “breakthroughs” reinforced women’s sense that the beauty index was inflating out of control, its claims reported too fast for the human brain to organize or verify.

Information overload joined new technologies in airbrushing and photo doctoring to give women the sense that scrutiny itself had become superhuman. The eye of the camera, like God’s, developed a microscopic judgment that outdid the imperfect human eye, magnifying “flaws” a mortal could not detect: In the early 1980s, says Morris Herstein of Laboratoires Serobiologiques, who
characterizes himself as a “pseudo-scientist,” “we were then able to see and measure things that had been impossible before. It came about when the technology of the space program was made available, when we were allowed to use their sophisticated analysis techniques, the biotechnological advances which allowed us to see things at the cellular level. Before that we had to touch and feel.” What Herstein is saying is that by measuring tissue invisible to the naked eye, beyond “touch and feel,” the struggle for beauty was transposed into a focus so minute that the struggle itself became metaphysical. Women were asked to believe that erasing lines so faint as to be nonexistent to the human gaze was now a reasonable moral imperative.

The tenuous link between what the holy oils claimed to do and what they did was finally broken, and no longer meant anything. “The numbers are meaningless until all the tests and rankings are standardized,” a women’s magazine quotes industry spokesman Dr. Grove, adding that “consumers should always remember that what the machine measures may not be visible to the naked eye.”

If the “enemy” is invisible, the “barrier” is invisible, the “eroding effects” are invisible, and the holy oil’s results “may not be visible to the naked eye,” we are in a dimension of pure faith, where “graphic evidence” is provided of the “visible improvement” in the number of angels that after treatment will dance on the head of a pin. The whole dramatic fiction of the holy oil’s fight against age began, by the mid-1980s, to unfold on an entirely make-believe stage, inventing psychic flaws to sell psychic cures. From that point on, the features of their faces and bodies that would make women unhappy would increasingly be those that no one else could see. More alone than ever, women were placed beyond the consolation of reason. Perfection had now to hold up beyond the artist’s frame, and survive the microscope.

Even many industry insiders acknowledge that the creams do not work. According to Buddy Wedderburn, a biochemist at Unilever: “The effect of rubbing collagen onto the skin is negligible. . . . I don’t know of anything that gets into these areas—certainly nothing that will stop wrinkles.” Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, the beauty care chain, says, “There is
no
application, no topical application, that will get rid of grief or stress or heavy
lines. . . . There’s nothing, but nothing, that’s going to make you look younger. Nothing.” Anthea Disney, editor of the women’s magazine
Self
, adds, “We all know there isn’t anything that will make you look younger.” And as “Sam” Sugiyama, codirector of Shiseido, concludes, “If you want to avoid aging, you must live in space. There is no other way to avoid getting wrinkles, once you are out of the womb.”

The professional collegial spirit that has helped keep the fraudulent nature of the industry’s claims fairly quiet was belatedly broken by Professor Albert Kligman of the University of Pennsylvania—whose whistle-blowing must be put in context: He is the developer of Retin-A, the one substance that does seem to do something, including subjecting the skin to inflammation, sunlight intolerance, and continuous heavy peeling. “In the industry today,” he wrote presciently to his colleagues, “fakery is replacing puffery . . . a consumer and FDA crackdown is inevitable and damaging to credibility.” He goes further in interviews: “When they make a claim of anti-aging, of the stuff having deep biological effects, then they have to be stopped. It’s pure bunkum . . . beyond the bounds of reason and truth.” And he says that the new products “simply cannot function as their backers and makers say they do, because it is physically impossible for them to get deep enough into the skin to make any lasting difference to wrinkles. The same applies to the removal of lines or wrinkles, or the permanent prevention of the aging of cells.” The hope of anything achieving such effects is, he says, “actually zero.”

“Some of my colleagues,” Kligman admits, “tell me, ‘Women are so dumb! How can they buy all that grease and stuff? Educated women, who’ve been to Radcliffe and Cambridge and Oxford and the Sorbonne—what gets into them? Why do they go to Bloomingdale’s and pay $250 for that hokum?’”

Women are “so dumb” because the establishment and its watchdogs share the cosmetics industry’s determination that we are and must remain “so dumb.” The “crackdown” came at last in the United States in 1987—but not from concern for women consumers exploited by a $20-billion-a-year fraud. The first straw was when heart specialist Dr. Christiaan Barnard brought out Glycel (“a fake, a complete fake,” says Dr. Kligman). The
doctor’s fame and superoutrageous claims for his product (“This was the first time in history that we can recall a physician putting his name to a cosmetic line,” says Stanley Kohlenberg of Sanofi Beauty Products) provoked envy in the rest of the industry. According to one of Gerald McKnight’s sources: “Somebody put it to the Agency that if they did not act to pull the product off the shelves, the industry would see to it that the FDA’s name was dragged through the mire.” The Food and Drug Administration then went after the industry as a whole “because we were all doing it, making wild claims.” The agency asked twenty-three chief cosmetics executives to account for “claims that they were flagrantly making in magazines, films and every possible area of hype . . . that they had added ‘magical’ anti-aging and cellular replacement ingredients to their products.” The FDA asked for “immediate withdrawal of the claims or submission for testing as drugs.” “We are unaware,” FDA director Daniel L. Michaels wrote to them, “of any substantial scientific evidence that demonstrates the safety and effectiveness of these articles. Nor are we aware that these drugs are generally recognized as safe and effective for their intended uses.” In other words, the agency said, if the creams do what you claim, they are drugs and must be tested. If they don’t, you are making false claims.

Is all this proof that anyone really cares about an industry whose targets for religious fraud are women? Morris Herstein points out that “the FDA is only saying, ‘Look, we’re concerned about what you’re
saying
, not what you’re doing.’ It is a dictionary problem, a lexicon problem, a question of vocabulary.” The head of the agency hardly sounds adversarial. “We’re not trying to punish anyone,” he told Deborah Blumenthal, a reporter for
The New York Times
, in 1988. She believed that the products would stay the same, only the “surrealist nature” of some claims would disappear. Three years later, these “surrealist” claims have re-emerged.

Think of the enormity: For twenty years the holy oils made “scientific” claims, using bogus charts and figures, of “proven improvement” and “visible difference” that were subject to no outside verification. Outside the United States, the same manufacturers continue to make false claims. In the United Kingdom, almost all holy oil ads ignore the British Code of Advertising
warning not to “contain any claim to provide rejuvenation, that is to prevent, retard or reverse the physiological changes and degenerative conditions brought about by, or associated with, increasing age.” The British Department of Trade and Industry finally followed suit in 1989 (as British dermatologist Ronald Marks said, “A lot of this stuff is cosmetic hoo-ha”), but the DTI has not yet committed the time or resources to follow through. In neither country has there been a public move to put pressure on the industry to print retractions or apologies to women; nor in the coverage of the change in regulations has the possibility been raised of financial compensation for the women consumers cheated so thoroughly for so many years.

Is it an overreaction to take such deception so seriously? Isn’t women’s relation to holy oils as trivial, the pathos of our faith as harmless, even endearing, as it is reflected in popular discourse? Women are poor; poorer than men. What is so important about 20 billion of our dollars a year? It would buy us, trivially enough,
each year,
roughly three times the amount of day care offered by the U.S. government: or 2,000 women’s health clinics; or 75,000 women’s film, music, literature, or art festivals; or 50 women’s universities; or 1 million highly paid home support workers for the housebound elderly; or 1 million highly paid domestic or child care workers; or 33,000 battered-women’s shelters; or 2 billion tubes of contraceptive cream; or 200,000 vans for late-night safe transport; or 400,000 full four-year university scholarships for young women who cannot afford further education; or 20 million airplane tickets around the world; or 200 million five-course dinners in four-star French restaurants; or 40 million cases of Veuve Clicquot champagne. Women are poor; poor people need luxuries. Of course women should be free to buy whatever they want, but if we are going to spend our hard-earned cash, the luxuries should deliver what they promise, not simply leech guilt money. No one takes this fraud seriously because the alternative to it is the real social threat: that women will first accept their aging, then admire it, and finally enjoy it. Wasting women’s money is the calculable damage; but the damage this fraud does women through its legacy of the dread of aging is incalculable.

The Food and Drug Administration “crackdown” avoided the possibility that corrupt conditions would change to let women
love the signs of their age. The language of the advertisements brilliantly and immediately shifted tone to the level of emotional coercion, each word carefully market-researched. These prose poems about women’s private needs and fears are even more persuasive than the earlier scientific lies. The success of a belief system depends upon how well the religious leaders understand the emotional situation of its targets. Holy oil ads began to take the emotional pulse of their audience with state-of-the-art accuracy.

Analyzing those ads, we see that women are under terrific stress. Many, though publicly confident, are secretly feeling vulnerable, exhausted, overwhelmed, and besieged. In the new scenario, unseen dangers assault an unprotected female victim: