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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.10 Plastic surgery to pad breasts or lift buttocks serves to make a woman look as though she was in her late teens or early 20s.11
Basic instinct12 keeps the beauty industry powerful. In medieval times, recipes for homemade cosmetics13 were kept in the kitchen right beside those used to feed the family. But it was not until the start of the 20th century, when mass production coincided with mass exposure to an idealised standard of beauty (through photography, magazines and movies) that the industry first took off.14
In 1909, Eugene Schueller founded the French Harmless Hair Colouring Co., which later became L'Oreal15 -today's industry leader. Two years later, Paul Beiersdorf, a Hamburg pharmacist16, 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 modern beauty salon17 in 1910, followed 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.18 Both thought beauty and health were interlinked. They combined facials with diets and exercise classes in a holistic approach that the industry is now returning to.19
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.20 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."21
