face with the authority of physiognomic expertise.3
Despite the moral stigma associated with a faint moustache or troublingly “low forehead,” antebellum women suffering from conspicuous hair had few good options at their disposal. Sticky plasters made from shoemakers’ waxes or tree resins were available, but appear to have been used primarily in the treatment of ringworm and other ailments.4 Most nonenslaved women probably avoided shaving their faces for the same reason that so many men did: in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shaving could be an unpleasant, even dangerous experience. Most shaving was accomplished with a sharpened edge of metal known as a “free hand” or “cut throat” razor, the use of which required both careful maintenance and considerable skill. As one scholar of shaving summarizes, “bloodbaths could only be prevented by experienced hands.”5 Sporadic reports of syphilis being transmitted by unskilled barbers—possible through direct contact with open sores—may have increased reluctance to shave.6 Prior to the advent of covered “safety” razors at the turn of the twentieth century, shaving was a relatively rarefied activity: men of means did not shave themselves, but instead relied on the services of skilled barbers.7
Barbering itself, moreover, was a craft dominated by men. In colonial America, as in eighteenth-century England, barbering was associated with bone setting, tooth extraction, bloodletting (to rebalance humors), and other aspects of medical “physick.” Until 1745, barbers shared a guild with surgeons, as fellow craftsmen engaged in the manual manipulation of bodies. Surgeons eventually severed their historic ties with barber-surgeons to create a distinct medical specialty, one more closely aligned with physicians and their learned, gentlemanly rank. Even then, women remained excluded from the skilled occupation of barbering just as they were from the medical professions. In multiple ways, then, antebellum American women were discouraged from using or submitting their faces and necks to the blade.8
Homemade depilatories therefore offered an appealing and relatively accessible alternative for banishing visible hair. In the context of a general aversion for “face-painting” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (powder and rouge were negatively associated with both aristocracy and prostitution), depilatories fell into the category of efforts to “transform the skin” that were considered generally socially acceptable. From the first years of white settlement in the New World through the turn of the nineteenth century, recipes for homemade depilatories were widespread, found throughout period cookery and etiquette manuals and passed from family member to family member and from neighbor to neighbor along with other domestic knowledge.9
A typical depilatory recipe appears in one of the most important English-language books on midwifery, The Byrth of Mankynde. First published in 1540, the book was reprinted numerous times over the subsequent century, influencing popular medicine across the American colonies. Along with other medical and domestic remedies, this “Woman’s Book” offered a detailed recipe for a homemade hair remover. “TO TAKE HAYRE FROM PLACES WHERE IT IS UNSEEMLY,” the recipe explained,
Take new burnt Lime foure ounces, of Arseneck an ounce, steepe both these in a pint of water the space of two days, and then boyle it in a pint to a half. And to prove whether it be perfect, dippe a feather therein, and if the plume of the feather depart off easily, then it is strong enough: with this water then anoint so farre the place yee would have bare from hayre, as it liketh you, and within a quarter of an houre pluck at the hayres and they will follow, and then wash that place much with water wherein Bran hath been steeped: and that done, anoint the place with the white of a new laid Egge and oyle Olive, beaten and mixt together with the juyce of Singrene or Purflaine, to allay the heat engendred of the fore-said lee.10
If women followed these elaborate instructions, those whose “hayre groweth so low in the foreheads and the temples, that it disfigureth them” might be saved.11 Such colonial depilatory recipes were as varied as they were complex. One influential sixteenth-century formula suggested boiling liquor calcis (a lime solution), silver paint, and aromatic oil together, soaking a rag in the resulting compound, and applying it to the hairy skin.12 A single seventeenth-century manual, Johann Jacob Wecker’s widely circulated book, Cosmeticks; or, The Beautifying Part of Physick, contained more than three-dozen recipes for ointments to hinder or remove hair.13 Others proposed applications of eggshells, vinegar, and cat’s dung, or thinning the eyebrows with a combination of ground ivy, gum, ant eggs, burnt leeches, and frog’s blood.14
These depilatories, part of larger traditions of folk medicine, merged English, French, and Spanish practices with Native American and African pharmacopeias in technically complicated ways.15 Although generally based on relatively simple raw materials such as spurge or acacia, hair-removing concoctions required considerable judgment and skill in their preparation, as suggested by the lengthy description in The Byrth of Mankinde.16 Some ingredients were highly combustible; others could lead to severe skin irritation or systemic poisoning for those who handled them carelessly.17 Like the production of homemade abortifacients, medicinal tinctures, and the countless other items produced in early American households, creating effective preparations for hair removal relied on considerable hands-on knowledge and skill.18
INDUSTRIAL CHANGE ERODED that expertise. To be sure, the shift from household to industrial production did not unfold along a single, uniform trajectory. Industrial change occurred piecemeal, varying from product to product and from nation to nation.19 Even solely within the United States, early industry took many forms. Some enterprises relied on water-powered machines, others on manual labor. Some focused on highly trained artisanal work, others on unskilled, specialized tasks. Some developed factories with dozens of employees; others remained in small shops. Some depended on enslaved workers, others on contract laborers supervised by managers. Some were financed by distant stockholders, others by capital from their on-site owners.20
The production of depilatories reflected these uneven developments, as individual households, particularly those in New England and the mid-Atlantic, moved stutteringly into the exchange of goods produced by strangers. Yet where many other aspects of women’s domestic labor, such as cooking and cleaning, were mechanized late in the century or not at all, homemade depilatories already were facing pressure from prefabricated alternatives by the turn of the nineteenth century.21 Advertisements for ready-made powders and creams to “take off all superfluous hair” began appearing in U.S. newspapers and magazines as early as 1801; packaged depilatories were available to women in European towns and cities even earlier.22 Marketed primarily though not exclusively to women, the powders promised to alleviate “unsightly appendages” from upper lips, foreheads, temples, and brows. The white face, still thought to mirror inner moral and spiritual qualities, remained the focus of commercial attention.23
While the precise composition of such products is unclear (and likely varied enormously from batch to batch when first produced), most would have worked in largely the same way: chemically softening or dissolving the hair so that it could be readily scraped or wiped from the surface of the skin. Some compositions, such as thallium compounds, produced a systemic toxicity that resulted in hair loss as well as nerve damage or death; arsenic compounds could produce vomiting, convulsions, coma, and death as well as hair loss. Twenty-first-century biochemists might explain that most depilatory compounds hydrolyze the disulfide bonds of keratin, the fibrous protein that makes up hair. Keratin’s sulfur-to-sulfur bonds, they would say, make hair strong and flexible; when those bonds are broken chemically, hair becomes weak and pliable enough to be wiped off with a cloth or putty knife, leaving the follicle intact. Makers of early depilatories, however, had no conception of disulfide bonds or hydrolyzing action. Depilatories predate the very word “keratin,” which the Oxford English Dictionary traces to an 1847 anatomical encyclopedia.24
Although the precise chemical composition of the various hair removers was obscure even to producers, interest in such packaged depilatories grew rapidly, alongside urban markets. Over the first half of the nineteenth
