Did the working class have a right to be beautiful? This question occupied the Reichstag's Social Policy Committee in 1929, as politicians and health care professionals debated whether cosmetic surgery should be covered by medical insurance, and, if so, on what grounds: because deformity caused mental anguish to the individual, making it a mental health issue, or because disfigurement hampered the worker's attempt to find employment, making “social cosmetics” an occupational policy for the welfare state.
Being beautiful and not being disfigured are two different things, of course. Even if Annelie Ramsbrock uses the terms interchangeably at times, seemingly conflating them, her book nevertheless intends to show the impact of these two disparate concepts on each other. Beginning in the fin-de-siècle, the interplay between new medical techniques and the cultural interpretation of beauty created normative expectations for what constituted an acceptable appearance. In the process, cosmetics were redefined as a medical field, beyond earlier considerations of beauty as a marker of hygiene or aesthetics. Medical expectations not only influenced but also reflected social norms, however, and this included changing views on class and gender. The “scientification of beauty” ultimately constituted a shift away from earlier idealist, moralistic views of beauty toward more modern concerns about the psychology of individual self-perception, on the one hand, and the need for social hygiene, on the other.
The book presents much fascinating material in support of this thesis. By 1900, advances in anesthesia and antiseptics made surgery generally less fatal, paving the way for elective cosmetic surgery (e.g., rhinoplasty). As is well known, World War I later increased the need for surgery on war wounds, and here the author produces fresh new details: even before August 1914, the German Ministry of War worried that improved medical treatment would make gunshot wounds to the face less lethal and thus lead to an unwelcome rise in the number of veterans with grotesque deformities. In response, the War Ministry's Medical Department had bullets fired into corpses to assess the potential damage, to aid in finding techniques to repair the deformities and prevent horrifying facial wounds from undermining morale on the home front. This cynically proactive stance further contributed to advancements in plastic surgery.
Shrapnel fire was not the only impetus for the scientification of cosmetics, however. Virtually every new scientific discovery was pressed into the service of a more pleasing appearance: x-rays, ultraviolet light, and electricity (i.e., electrolysis) were all used for treating dermatological conditions, for instance. As a result, dermatologists increasingly conceived of themselves as healthcare professionals, a move that was institutionalized in the 1920s in the form of a new type of beauty salon, staffed with certified cosmeticians who combined the image of rigorous health science with the luxury of adornment by pampering the body. The author suggests that the application of science to aesthetics ultimately made cosmetics more acceptable to the middle classes, who had, in the past, eschewed make-up as a form of duplicity. At the same time, Weimar's burgeoning advertising industry told lower-middle-class women, now publicly visible in office jobs, that only attractive workers could find good positions, thus pressuring white-collar workers into consuming more cosmetics. Drawn into the “culture of achievement,” beauty was no longer seen as a natural endowment but rather as a badge of merit, democratically accessible to every woman who worked hard enough on her outward appearance.
These fascinating observations make up chapters 3, 4, and 5, which together carry a clear narrative arc, and the book is well worth reading for these chapters alone. One wishes, however, that the author had applied as much care to the first two chapters, and especially to the one on beauty advice in the nineteenth century: intended to provide context for future developments, it seems lackluster and thin, largely due to the paucity of sources. While later chapters draw on a rich variety of materials—medical records, doctors' papers, illustrated magazines, trade journals, associational records, parliamentary minutes, government reports—the chapter on the long nineteenth century relies almost exclusively on beauty manuals. Moreover, as the author acknowledges, these manuals were remarkably similar since they often drew on one other verbatim, thus conveying a one-dimensional view.
There were, of course, many other sources of beauty advice before World War I, most obviously the plethora of women's magazines catering to a wide range of readers. This is not to say that the author is unaware of such sources. In one of the later chapters on Weimar, she cites a provocative quote from the 1905 issue of Das Äussere, a pre-World War I magazine dedicated to traditional “feminine charms,” to prove that “before the war it had been unthinkable for women to combine physical beauty and gainful employment” (140). She does not take into consideration, however, that Das Äussere failed after only three years and was directly succeeded by Die Frau und ihre Zeit, which featured, alongside beauty advice, stories about women explorers, athletes, professionals, and even financial geniuses. A more extended view of the sources might, in fact, suggest a different conclusion: that the magazine's readers were interested specifically in both female beauty and female careers. More generally, one wonders how descriptions of beauty differed among a variety of magazines that spanned the second half of the nineteenth century, from Lina Morgenstern's socially-engaged Deutsche Hausfrauenzeitschrift, to Ella Mensch's Frauen-Rundschau, with its recurring profiles on “independent women,” to the traditional Catholic Martha, to Maja, a supplement to the trade journal, Der Deutsche Kaufmann, which was aimed at the same white-collar women whom the author discusses only for the Weimar period.
Excavating the beauty advice in these sources would certainly have taken some digging, but it would have allowed the author to avoid the dubious claim that nineteenth-century conceptions of beauty did not change, even though “social reality” (42) did. A richer view of the nineteenth century would not have altered the book's thesis on the scientification of cosmetics, but deepened it by revealing continuities alongside ruptures. The Science of Beauty nevertheless does an admirable job of tying together culture, social policy, and medical techniques to create a serious and compelling depiction of the twentieth-century origins of our own contemporary beauty aesthetics.
