(electronic music phrase) (whimsical music) - We all know cosmetics as the billion dollar industry that dominates our magazines, social media, and television screens with targeted ads to get us to buy its products.

Sorry, that was a typo.

I meant $445 billion industry.

And that truly staggering number means that a considerable amount of corporate dollars are being poured into ad campaigns to influence how and what we buy when it comes to looking good, Now, we've all seen some celebrity hawk the benefits of, say, a tea that has proprietary chemicals in it, or patented formulas that will shrink your stomach, or even hair gummies that will make your locks extra luscious, but have you ever stopped to wonder, when did beauty ads become less about beauty and more about science?

I'm basically numb to all of these shampoo commercials that show a cross section of a strand of hair, followed by a woman in a lab coat staring intently at a beaker, and it's gotten to the point that I tune out ads that try to sell me on some signature blend of supplements for my skin care regime.

But let the buyer and the makeup user beware, because some research has shown that this trend in beauty advertising may be more about sounding science-y than actually using science to get results.

For example, in 2015, a team of marketing experts, led by Dr. Jie Fowler at Valdosta State University, examined the claims made in hundreds of makeup ads found in magazines, and they found that, more often than not, the claims these ads made were either false, deliberately vague, or omitted important information.

So this week, we're getting to the root of when science and pseudoscience became tools for hawking cosmetics, and for separating people from their paychecks, in hopes of feeling more beautiful.

It all begins in the years right after World War II, when there was a new fascination with science and technology, a big boom in marketing, and a woman from Poland who understood, better than anyone else, how to capitalize on the times.

Before we get into the rhetoric of beauty ads themselves, which were largely an invention of the very late 19th and early 20th century, we should do a quick rundown of what was happening in the beauty world before that.

I'm gonna label these centuries of cosmetics productions the DIY phase, because, for hundreds of years, for the average Jill and Jane, a lot of cosmetics were homemade.

For example, achieving pale skin has been popularized in beauty regimens around the world, and throughout history, including in areas of Europe, East Asia, and in ancient Egypt, and that's because pale skin was often seen as a sign of elite status, because, if you were tan, that meant you had to work for a living, and most work was done outside, in the sun.

So skin lightening and whitening with homemade concoctions became popular.

For example, in Elizabethan England, applying creams that contained carbonate hydroxide and lead oxide became the norm to achieve this aesthetic, but these creams were extremely dangerous, causing skin irritation and probably even poisoning, although people didn't know that at the time.

But once they wised up, then whitening creams with things like zinc oxide and other formulas came into fashion in the 19th century.

But even though people were busy grinding up all sorts of concoctions at home, that didn't mean that folks couldn't purchase cosmetics from crafty retailers.

Take the case of perfumes, which often involved a labor-intensive process to gather and prepare all of those fragrant ingredients, but in the 13th century, alcohol-based perfumes that originated from the Middle East, spread throughout Europe, leading to perfumeries springing up as a result of that pretty sweet-smelling business.

So although cosmetics have been around for millennia, they weren't the codified industry that they are now.

But how can we connect cosmetic products with the advent of modern advertising?

Well, if you've watched our video on why Santa wears red, you know that advertising isn't a 20th century invention.

In fact, it's existed in some form for centuries, just like cosmetics.

The example I always like to use is 17th century ads that were centered on getting consumers in Western Europe hooked on drinking coffee before the beverage was popular across the continent.

These kinds of adverts centered on selling new commodities and technologies, but not specific products, because they weren't really brands as we know them today.

Consumers just brought containers to the stores and bought stuff in bulk.

But this changed at the tail end of the 19th century, when we start to see the emergence of brands that sold pre-packaged items with their names emblazoned on the front.

So at the dawn of the 20th century, when purchasing habits changed, ads changed, too.

Their focus turned from how do we get customers to buy a new commodity to how can we get customers to buy a certain brand of a particular product, and build brand loyalty around it?

Because let's face it, sometimes there are differences between different brands that justify a price hike, but a lot of the time, we buy a certain brand because it's the one we grew up with, or because it's the only one whose jingle we can remember when we get to the store, and 20th century ad techniques played a big role in making that happen.

And like our good friend, Santa Claus, seriously, go watch that episode, makeup wasn't immune to this shift in advertising.

Okay, so we've moved on from makeup DIY through the 19th and the dawn of the 20th century, with modern advertising, which brings us to World War I.

And along with the stressors of wartime came some more unexpected byproducts.

One of them was the absence of men who had been sent to fight, meaning that women often had access to increased earnings as they entered the workforce.

As World War I drew to a close, and we moved into the 1920s, a new tool appeared for selling beauty products, these newfangled things called film stars.

That's right, long before Instagram celebs, film stars were selling beauty trends on the big screen.

Think Greta Garbo's super skinny, but still stylish, eyebrows.

Meanwhile, drugstores and big retailers were getting in on the beauty market, and beauty, like all other branded products, had to convince buyers, mainly women, to purchase their particular brand of makeup above all others.

So by the time the post-war period began, we entered a phase I'd like to call the problem solver type of beauty ads.

We start to see ad campaigns with taglines that essentially point out, or invent, an everyday beauty issue, and then offer their branded products as a solution to this problem.

Have stinky bits?

Use our brand of deodorant.

Wanna wear strapless dresses and bear some thigh in shorts?

Buy this razor that is specifically for women, and is in no way, shape, or form the same exact razors being sold to men with different packaging.

More on that in the Why Do Women Shave origins episode, So head over and watch it.

So the problem solver beauty ads were selling style and solutions for the modern woman, and the coding of style often had to do with aspirations of high class, but this association with status was often fraught for women, since sometimes wearing heavy makeup in the first half of the 20th century was thought to be a sign of low morals, or lower-class status.

But at other times, certain makeup trends, like pale skin, skinny brows, and pancake makeup, invented for actresses who were on camera, were associated with film stars and high class.

But there was one woman who pioneered the linking of beauty marketing with the language of science, a Polish immigrant by the name of Helena Rubinstein.

Rubinstein built her business empire by selling her signature brand of face creams to women in Australia, but after taking her business worldwide in the 19-teens, her ads started to take on a distinctly science-y tone.

From around the 1930s, Rubinstein's ad campaigns featured language about priceless formulas which were never specified, and without any real quantities given to protect their secrecy.

The ads also featured the company's founder sporting lab coats and gazing pensively into beakers in a staged laboratory.

The effect was that, outside of selling luxury, Rubinstein's products guaranteed real results, and merited their hefty price tags over her competitors, who usually emphasized high class and style in their ads, instead.

And the post-war fascination with science is evidenced in some of the more, let's call them unusual, mid-century beauty campaigns.

Take, for example, this commercial for cold cream that claims it can remove 100% of makeup and grime, and attempts to prove it by sprinkling radioactive dirt on a model's cheeks before asking her to use the cream, then scanning her face with a Geiger counter.

Yikes!

Rubinstein's famous brand made her a millionaire many times over.

She died in 1965, and her brand was then sold to L'Oreal in 1988, but according to a website for her products, her brand remains anchored in its founder's values.

Science in the service of beauty, women's liberation, and the audacity to rewrite the rules.

And rewrite the rules she did, with many of her competitors following suit, so much so that most cosmetics companies have whole chemistry and development departments, not only to help them test products to meet federal guidelines, but also to help them mix up ways to pitch products to buyers.

But even some of the chemists involved in making, testing, and selling these products, urge us against being drawn in by a vaguely science-y-sounding ad.

One cosmetic chemist who blogs anonymously at thebeautybrains.com is even quoted saying in the New York times, "If you are trying "to decide between a 16-ounce bottle "of Suave lotion and a one-ounce $300 jar "of Perricone, if it doesn't have sciency-sounding words "in there, people are going to feel a little foolish "at plopping down that money."

So science-y ads are more centered on distinguishing brands and branded products than they are about their actual efficacy, and in some cases, they're more about helping companies to justify higher prices to consumers than they are about telling us if a product really works.

So what do you think?