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
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