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Then
again, a curvy body, with big breasts.'and a waist-to-hip ratio of
less than 0.8- Barbie’s is 0.54 - shows an ideal stage of
readiness for conception.Plastic surgery to pad breasts or lift
buttocks serves to make a woman look as though she was i n her
late teens or early 20s."
Basic
instinctl keeps the beauty industry powerful. In medieval time s ,
recipes for homemade cosmetics were kept in the kitchen light
beside those used to feed the family. But it was not until the
start of the 20th centuly, when mass production coincided with
mass exposure to an idealised standard of beauty (through
photography, magazines and movies) that the industry first took
off.
In
1909, Eugene Schueller founded the French Harmless Hair Colouring
Co., which later became L'Orea1's - today's industry leader . Two
years later,Paul Beiersdorf, a Hamburg pharmacist', developed the
first cream to bind oil and water . Today, it sells in 150
countries as Nivea, the biggest personal-care brand in the world.
But
it was the great rivalry between two women in America that made
the industry what it is today. Elizabeth Arden opened the first
modem beauty salonl7 in 1910,fo11owed a few years later by Helena
Rubinstein, a Polish immigrant. The two took cosmetics out of
household pots and pans and into the modern era. Both thought
beauty and health were interlinked. They combined facial s wi th
diets and exercise classes in a holistic approach that the
industry is now returning to.
The
emerging beauty industry played on the fear of looking ugly as
much as on the pleasure of looking beautiful, drawing on the new
science of psychology to convince women that an inferiority
complex could be cured by a dab of lipstick.On launching' her
famous eight-hour cream, developed for her horses, Arden quipped:
"I judge a woman and a horse by the same criteria: legs, head
and rear end."
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