Perfume by Lizzie Ostrom

Author:Lizzie Ostrom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

Hypnotique

BY MAX FACTOR, 1958

THE CHARM-OFFENSIVE PERFUME

IN THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, Rona Jaffe’s novel about young women of the 1950s breaking into the world of work, Barbara Lemont, assistant beauty editor on America’s Woman magazine, is asked by a Madison Avenue ad man whether he should place a commercial in her magazine on behalf of his client, Wonderful perfume. Barbara deters him. Though she herself, as a young working girl, wears Wonderful and would ‘spend practically my last cent on cosmetics and perfume’, the young housewives and mothers who lug their prams along the grocery aisles are far too harassed, tired and poor to afford luxury fragrances. ‘They buy cologne in the drugstore,’ she advises him, and if they’re lucky, might get scent as a Christmas present from their husband, ‘but more often a big appliance like a washing machine’.

Barbara’s analysis shows us how the world of beauty was changing to cater for women on a budget – the very ones who over in Britain might have been attracted by the offerings of Grossmith and Goya. We can see this demographic in the pages of Charm, a 1950s American lifestyle magazine ‘for women who work’ that carried features such as ‘You and Your Paycheck’, ‘Who Gets the TV Jobs?’ and ‘Cooking in a Closet Kitchen’. Pervading the magazine was a feeling of managed spending, of having disposable income but needing to judiciously watch the dollars and cents so as to avoid losing everything for which one had worked so hard. Charm was an apt name, for the endgame was still eventually to marry, not to become managing director. In one feature on perfume, the magazine suggested that while during the day women might wear fragrance to please themselves, ‘the fragrance we use at night we should use for others, to make a warm and loving mood, to complete us as women in our ancient role’.

Max Factor’s 1958 spicy success story, Hypnotique, was one of these perfumes for the Charm reader: mysterious and inviting, yet available in pharmacy chains everywhere. It was propelled into the big time after becoming one of five recommended scents in Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 Sex and the Single Girl, a lifestyle bibie which expounded on much of what was implied in Rona Jaffe’s novel and which sold an astonishing two million copies in its first fortnight in print. Sex and the Single Girl famously encouraged women to embrace the liberation of not settling down – for now – and to enjoy the experience of seeing a few guys before angling for a husband. Alongside Brown’s tips on dining out, getting in touch with one’s sexuality and conversing with men came her advice to saturate cotton wads with perfume and hide them in the bra: ‘Remember, if you can’t smell it, probably he can’t smell it either so you’re being wastefully stingy.’

We can see this positioning of scent as a weapon of entrapment in the campaigns for Hypnotique, in which the bottle was dangled in front of the eyes and waved back and forth like a metronome with the command to ‘make him concentrate.

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