Geoffrey G. Jones, author of Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry and Harvard Business School Business History professor, put together a list of beauty industry hallmarks from his book published by Oxford University Press USA in April of 2010. With his permission we are replicating his list:
1. Eugène Schueller, the founder of the world’s biggest beauty company L’Oréal, invented the world’s first safe synthetic hair dye after numerous experiments in his own kitchen, with the police being regularly called because of explosions.
2. Olay, now the world's fourth largest beauty brand, originated in the wartime research of a chemist in South Africa, who developed a topical skin treatment to prevent dehydration of burn wounds on pilots. The brand was purchased by the Australian subsidiary of an American company in 1970, which was in turn acquired by Procter & Gamble in 1985. The brand was then re-invented, and taken global.3. François Coty, one of France’s greatest beauty entrepreneurs, got his perfume business started by smashing one of his bottles on the floor of a leading Parisian department store in a successful gambit to get customers to smell it.
4. Perfume was drunk as a health drink right up to the nineteenth century, and men were as likely as women to use cosmetics.
5. The Communist regime of Mao Zedong banned the use of cosmetics in the 1970s, and visitors to China struggled to tell men from women. Today China is the world’s fourth largest beauty market, with most leading Western brands sold as skin lighteners.
6. Among the first American female millionaires were two African-American beauty entrepreneurs — Madam C. J. Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone.
7. Anita Roddick established the first Body Shop in Brighton, England, to finance her husband’s ambition to spend two years riding on horseback from Buenos Aires to New York City.
8. Max Factor, the great Hollywood makeup artist, began his career as wigmaker and cosmetician for the Imperial Russian Grand Opera, before fleeing to America in 1904, and taking the name given to him at the Ellis Island Immigrant Station: Max Factor.
9. The modern Indian cosmetics industry originated when Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, requested the Tata business group to create an Indian-owned cosmetics business, which was then expanded by the French-born Simone N. Tata, who had married into the Tata family.
10. After the forced opening up of Japan by Commodore Perry in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the priorities of the modernizing Japanese government was to change the cosmetic appearances of their population to make them look more Western. Women were prohibited from the traditional practices of blackening their teeth and shaving their eyebrows, and men were prohibited from wearing cosmetics altogether.
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