06/17/2024
Cordery (Alice), a history professor at Iowa State University, provides a breezy biography of the “high priestess of cosmetics.” Born Florence Nightingale Graham in 1881 Canada, Elizabeth Arden moved to New York in 1908 to escape poverty. Driven by a desire to “make women beautiful,” she opened her first salon in 1910. After traveling abroad to “unearth Europe’s beauty secrets,” she introduced eyeshadow—“a daring new trend” unfamiliar to most American women of the time—to the U.S.; popularized the coordination of clothes and makeup with a “color harmony” system; and framed lifestyle practices like exercise and spa treatments as vital to beauty and well-being. In the process, she shaped the era’s ideal of a “new woman” who flouted “conventional gender strictures” yet gained self-assurance and social capital from her appearance (“Beauty is power... it opens doors that nothing else can open,” she frequently said). While Arden remains somewhat of an enigma, the detailed insight into her business practices—including how she framed her treatments as a gateway to the elite—intrigues. Beauty buffs will be rapt. (Sept.)