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MEDIEVAL noblewomen swallowed arsenic and dabbed on bats' blood to improve their complexions; 18th-century Americans prized the warm urine of young boys to erase their freckles; Victorian ladies removed their ribs to give themselves a wasp waist. The desire to be beautiful is as old as civilisation, as is the pain that it can cause. In his autobiography, Charles Darwin noted a “universal passion for adornment”, often involving “wonderfully great” suffering.

The pain has not stopped the passion from creating a $160 billion-a-year global industry, encompassing make-up, skin and hair care, fragrances, cosmetic surgery, health clubs and diet pills. Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education. Such spending is not mere vanity. Being pretty—or just not ugly—confers enormous genetic and social advantages. Attractive people (both men and women) are judged to be more intelligent and better in bed; they earn more, and they are more likely to marry.

Beauty matters most, though, for reproductive success. A study by David Buss, an American scientist, logged the mating preferences of more than 10,000 people across 37 cultures. It found that a woman's physical attractiveness came top or near top of every man's list. Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist and author of “Survival of the Prettiest”, argues that “good looks are a woman's most fungible asset, exchangeable for social position, money, even love. But, dependent on a body that ages, it is an asset that a woman uses or loses.”
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Beauty is something that we recognise instinctively. A baby of three months will smile longer at a face judged by adults to be “attractive”. Such beauty signals health and fertility. Long lustrous hair has always been a sign of good health; mascara makes eyes look bigger and younger; blusher and red lipstick mimic signs of sexual arousal. Whatever the culture, relatively light and flawless skin is seen as a testament to both youth and health: partly because skin permanently darkens after pregnancy; partly because light skin makes it harder to hide illness. This has spawned a huge range of creams to treat skin in various ways.

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 in her late teens or early 20s: the perfect mate. “Mimicry is the goal of the beauty industry,” says Ms Etcoff.

Basic instinct keeps the beauty industry powerful. In medieval times, recipes for homemade cosmetics 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.
From small roots to big business

In 1909, Eugène Schueller founded the French Harmless Hair Colouring Co, which later became L'Oréal—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. Around the same time, in Tokyo's upmarket Ginza, Arinobu Fukuhara hit on eudermine lotion—the first Japanese cosmetic based on a scientific formula, and the first product for the Shiseido company.

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 salon 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. 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.

Rubinstein considered facelifts (via leather straps and electricity) to be as acceptable as lipstick, while Arden pioneered beauty branding, with her iconic gold and pink packaging. The two women, together with Max Factor (which originally produced make-up for actresses), built the foundations of modern marketing, bewitching consumers with aggressive tactics such as celebrity endorsements and magazine advertorials. In the 1930s they were joined by Revlon, and after the second world war by Estée Lauder. All these companies are still around.

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. Even then, ruthlessness and outright quackery lurked behind the façade. On launching her famous eight-hour cream, developed for her horses, Arden quippe😛 “I judge a woman and a horse by the same criteria: legs, head and rear end.”