6 - Embracing the Beauty Regimen in British and American Women's Magazines

Summary

A brief text-based advertisement for the skin lotion Rowland's Kalydor in Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion in 1880 begins with two words in capital letters: ‘WOMAN's RIGHTS’ (198). It goes on to propose that ‘One of the chief rights of woman is to look as beautiful as she can, and to use all legitimate means to this end.’ While the advertisement suggests that ‘art has seconded nature's efforts by supplying such an elegant preparation as ROWLAND's KALYDOR’ (198), there were distinct limits to the acceptable use of beauty products and procedures. This reference to art supporting nature did not mean a broad acceptance of cosmetics as we know them today, specifically in relation to ‘make-up’ such as lipstick, eyeshadow and mascara. As the previous chapter argued, the birth of the stage celebrity and the publicity that surrounded the images and lives of these women played a critical role in transforming beauty norms and practices. Kathy Peiss proposes that in the American context, photographic and stage techniques surrounding make-up and posing ‘introduced external and standardized models of beauty that challenged the “natural” ideal’ (49). The lingering power of the natural ideal, combined with the growing abundance of brand-name products and visual models of beautiful women for emulation, required a decades-long process of negotiation in the pages of women's magazines.

Margaret Beetham has likened women's magazines to corsets in that each can serve as an ‘instrument of control and source of pleasure’ (‘Natural’ 163). This sense of competing ideologies – between demarcating the bounds of acceptable femininity and enabling a range of fantasies – is especially visible in women's fashion magazines in the late nineteenth century. Such a tension between oppression and emancipation, as Elizabeth Carolyn Miller puts it, can also be extended to beauty consumerism in the late nineteenth century (318). For Miller, femininity in the Victorian period became increasingly tied to ‘self-imposed regimens of healthy, beauty, fashion, and appearance’, shifting women's status as the property of individual men to that of ‘social property, in need of constant maintenance to meet the new cultural standards of femininity’ (318).