“History of the Global Beauty Products Industry…Part
1”
As Told by Professor Geoffrey Jones, Author of
the Book ‘Beauty Imagined’ in This Interview by Sean Silverthorne
It is indeed amazing to see the kind of work people do. I came across this
interview of HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL Business History Professor Geoffrey Jones a little over a year
ago, and I’ve since been intrigued by the stuffs he wrote about in the book.
In the book, he traces the history of the $330 billion global beauty
industry. It had some fascinating entrepreneurs throughout the world –
France, United States, Japan, India and Brazil etc, and it was quite a history.
So little is known about this dynamic industry; and what little is out there is
mostly quickly dismissed as trivial or irrelevant in the larger
corporate/business world. But this is where Jones’ study helps out in no
small measure.
Below is the Interview, Enjoy!
Sean Silverthorne: What inspired your interest
in the beauty business and its history?
Geoffrey Jones: My
initial interest in the beauty industry was triggered by my earlier history of
the consumer products giant Unilever, published some years ago. This company
had a long-established business in soap and other toiletries, but spent decades
after World War II striving without great success to expand its business into
other categories of the beauty industry, such as skin care and perfume.
As I researched this story, I realized both the
huge size and the importance of this industry—and the remarkable paucity of
authoritative literature about it. Or more precisely, while there are numerous
books on various aspects of the beauty industry, from glossy coffee-table
publications on cherished brands of perfume to feminist denunciations of the
industry as demeaning to women, there were very few studies that treated beauty
seriously, as a business. So I saw both a challenge and an opportunity to
research the story of how this industry grew from modest origins, making
products that were often deemed an affront to public morality, to the $330
billion global industry of today.
Sean Silverthorne: Why has this industry been so
neglected by business school faculty?
And then there is the frequently observed gender bias in business school faculty. I suspect male faculty, who comprised the majority in most schools until quite recently, regarded this industry as a feminine domain and rather frivolous and felt more comfortable writing about software or venture capital than lipstick and face powder. As female faculty built careers in business schools, they may also have been disinclined to conform to assumed gender stereotypes instead of working in beauty. The fashion industry, which is also huge, suffers from the same lack of attention from management researchers.
His take on the evolution of soaps, perfume and lipsticks:
Sean Silverthorne: What do you think were the most significant products that marked the evolution of the beauty industry?
Geoffrey Jones: I would begin with soap. The technology to make soap was known for several thousand years, but the product was rarely used for personal washing, especially by Europeans who largely avoided washing with water after the Black Death in the Middle Ages, believing it to be dangerous. Then, as public health concerns rose during the 19th century and water began to be piped into people’s houses, a number of brilliant entrepreneurs built a demand for soap as a branded product by linking its use to godliness, securing celebrity endorsement, and later suggesting that the use of some brands would bring romantic success. Using soap for washing became associated with Western civilization and even as an essential entry ticket for immigrants seeking to become true Americans.
The transformation of perfume also marks an important stage in the evolution of the modern beauty industry. In the early 19th century, perfume was made in small batches, rarely applied to the skin, and drunk for health reasons. There was a narrow range of available scents. A hundred years later, the application of new technologies to extract essences from flowers and plants, and to create synthetic fragrances, had transformed perfume. Historically, perfumes were reminiscent of one individual “note”—to employ the musical metaphor used in the industry—which tried to replicate nature. The new perfumes had a vastly increased range of scents; were far more abstract, with three notes; and offered scents not found in nature. Meanwhile, a marketing revolution had turned perfume into a branded product, sold at different price points in different distribution channels, and increasingly gendered. While historically men and women had used the same scents, they now began to like to smell differently, with scents now reminding genders of their roles in the world.
As for decorative cosmetics, the story of lipstick is really interesting. While the use of lipstick, like many cosmetics products, reaches far back into human history, in the early 20th century it was still a product associated with actresses and women of dubious morality. Thereafter, the use and acceptability of lipstick expanded. There was technological innovation—the first metal lipstick container was invented in Connecticut in 1915, and the first screw-up lipstick appeared six years later. By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, the government declared the production of lipstick to be a wartime necessity, such was its impact on morale.
Really amazing, isn’t it? Yes, i thought so too...
You’ve got to read the second part of this interview – Prof Jones talks about Maverick Beauty Entrepreneurs, how Television influenced the Beauty Industry etc.
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