Fashion Victims by Alison Matthews David

Author:Alison Matthews David
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472577740
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

15. Before and after photographs of Mrs. Brown, who was blinded by the aniline dye in her eyelash and eyebrow dye, 1933. Courtesy Food and Drug Administration Archives.

The Chamber of Horrors exhibit included this disturbing before and after portrait of Mrs. Brown to emphasize the danger of the product. Time Magazine reported that when Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, discovered the photographs of Mrs. Brown, she “pressed them to her breast crying ‘I cannot bear to look at them.’”78 Another 52-year-old woman died eight days after her beauty-parlour operator daughter applied Lash-Lure and the Journal of the American Medical Association had reported at least 17 similar cases. The “Criminal Ingredient” was also used to dye fur and felt in the United States, where it was marketed under the trade name Ursol.79 Although it poisoned one out of every 120 people who used it and is now known to be a powerful contact allergen, American laws passed in 1906 before the widespread use of cosmetics could not forbid its use in hair and eyelash preparations because the manufacturer did not falsely claim that it cured a disease. Because of this lack of legislation, Lash-Lure, a “caustic ‘beautifier’ capable of burning the very eyeballs out of your head” was still carried in stores nationwide in 1936.80 In 2011, Sali Hughes, a beauty columnist for the U.K. newspaper The Guardian, wrote an article entitled “Could Your Hair Dye Kill You?”81 She penned it a month after Tabatha McCourt, a 17-year-old Scottish teenager, died of a severe reaction to p-phenylenediamine, or PPD, in a hair dye.82 Hughes herself has a glossy head of black hair but was hospitalized after having a similar allergic reaction when her hair was tinted in her usual salon. Although it is banned in makeup, PPD is still used in 99 percent of hair dyes today, including those manufactured by L’Oreal, Clairol, and Avon, because it covers grey hair so effectively. As with so many other toxins in beauty products and clothing, from lead in lipstick to PPD in hair dye, contaminants that should have been consigned to history are still very much present in our lives and on our bodies. The economic imperatives of manufacturers and the social imperatives of propriety and beauty are still with us: just as men flocked to blacken their boots with dyes and polishes in the Victorian era, most women feel pressure to dye their grey hair in more socially acceptable if not more beautiful shades.

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