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
