Ugly Beauty (6 page)

Eugène became part of the group at the invitation
of Victor Auger. It was his first introduction to the notion that life, or parts
of it, might be spent having fun, and he adored it. Ever after, recreation, for
him, meant L’Arcouest and its pastimes. In 1926 he built himself a luxurious
house there on a high spit of land that had once been a beautiful orchard. He
kept his own yacht, the
Edelweiss
; Ambre Solaire was
invented to counter the sunburn he suffered while sailing it. Sorbonne-sur-mer
did not approve. The plot of land had first been noticed, and coveted, by
another member of the group, and they found the house pretentious—there was even
a colonnade, Fred Joliot remarked with disgust. Worse, he fenced his estate off,
something unheard-of.
8
Schueller didn’t care.
He might love L’Arcouest and its pastimes, but once he became rich, the simple,
communal life was not his idea of pleasure.

The breezy outdoor life at L’Arcouest also set a
benchmark for an ideal of feminine beauty. The magazine
Votre Beauté
, which he established in 1933, always included articles
on the healthy sporting life, and promoted a tanned and glowing look that
related more to fitness and exercise than paint and powder—something rather
unusual in the 1930s.

But academic life, even as enjoyed by
Sorbonne-sur-mer, was not for him, and in 1905, after only two years as an
instructor, he glimpsed a way of escape. A hairdresser came to the Pharmacie
Central, offering to pay fifty francs a month to someone who would help him find
a safe and reliable artificial hair dye. Schueller eagerly volunteered. A
harmless hair dye might not be what Fred Joliot meant by an “important
discovery,” but it was an interesting problem. Nobody had tackled it before,
because hair dye was, as Schueller put it, “such a small part of the scheme of
things.”
9
That was to say, it was women’s
frippery and therefore of little interest to male chemists. Indeed, they
retained this blind spot even after it became clear that fortunes were to be
made in the beauty business. In 1935, the Consumer Research book
Skin Deep
declared, “So far as we have been able to
learn, there is no hair dye which is both certainly safe and at the same time
effective.”
10
In fact, such a hair dye had
by then existed for nearly thirty years—but it was available only in France, and
no American chemist had concerned himself with this problem.

Schueller discovered that hair dyes were based upon
four groups of substances: anilines, silver nitrate, pyrogallic acid, and lead
acetate. The first group was the most dangerous. Aniline derivatives are very
soluble, going through many intermediate stages before forming the lacquers
which give the hair its new color, and some of these derivatives are extremely
caustic and may eventually enter the bloodstream, affecting the white cells and
giving rise to chemical eczema. Anilines were, nevertheless, the most popular
base for hair dyes, because they were easy to prepare. Their dangers were known,
but as only 3 to 5 percent of users were adversely affected, they were sold
widely. Silver nitrate and lead acetate were less dangerous compounds, though
still not altogether safe, but they turned the hair raven-black. “You could see
it was artificial a hundred yards away,” Schueller remarked. Such blatant
artificiality scandalized people: Eugène’s own mother would point her finger at
a neighbor. “She’s using hair dye! And we thought she was a decent woman!” He
finished by writing so many articles on the subject for the
Grande Revue Scientifique
that he eventually made a little book out
of them:
De l’Innocuité des teintures pour cheveux
.
(It is not dated, but since among the author’s many listed
qualifications—Ingénieur-Chimiste, Diplômé de l’Université de Paris,
Ex-préparateur à la Sorbonne, Ex-chef du Laboratoire des Recherches de la
Pharmacie Centrale de France—he included “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,” it
must have been published after World War I, when he received this
decoration.)

The hair-dye job meant working at the hairdresser’s
salon in the evenings, from eight till eleven, at the end of an already
unimaginably long day. Eugène’s excessive appetite for hard work had not
endeared him to his boss at the Institute, and he soon found himself exiled to a
factory at Plaine-St.-Denis, out in the northern suburbs. Work there started at
6:30 a.m. There was as yet no Metro. To arrive in time, he had to get up at 4:30
and take a tram. And at the end of the day, the hairdresser’s salon was on the
other side of Paris.

It was not long before Eugène fell out with the
hairdresser—in one account because the hairdresser took no interest in the work,
in another because Eugène wanted to claim all the credit for himself. The
probable truth was that Eugène’s acute business antennae sensed the moneymaking
potential of this work, and he preferred to pursue it on his own. The
hairdresser, too, must have had some notion of a harmless hair dye’s commercial
possibilities, else he would not have commissioned the work in the first place.
He specialized in hair dyes, and his clients referred to his store of bottles as
“the fountain of youth,” a phrase potent enough to start the mental
cash-registers ringing loud and clear. He had only employed Eugène because he
did not know how to make the new product himself and needed a consultant who
did. Unfortunately for him, the consultant fate allotted him happened to be that
extreme rarity, a brilliant scientist who was also a business genius, and whose
sensitivity to potential moneyspinners, and ability to make them spin money,
would turn out to surpass that of almost anyone else in France.

The prospect of working for himself with a definite
end in view, and of financial independence should he succeed, suited Eugène far
better than dreary academic security. He decided to continue his research on his
own account, and resigned from the Pharmacie Centrale. His boss was
disbelieving. He was still only twenty-six and was already being paid a special
salary, 250 francs a month. How could he give it up, just like that?

It was indeed an excellent salary—so much so that
during his three years at the Pharmacie he had managed to save 3,000 francs,
enough to support him while he perfected his formulas. The only snag was, he’d
lent most of the money to a friend who was not just then in a position to pay it
back. He resigned anyway, on 800 francs, the capital remaining to him. The
two-room apartment on rue d’Alger cost 400 francs a year, which since he had
also to eat and buy materials gave him a little less than two years. The dining
room became his office, the bedroom his lab. He lived alone, cooked for himself,
and slept in a little camp bed until it was crowded out by laboratory equipment,
when he took it up to a vacant storage room. “When I think back to those days, I
can’t imagine how I got through them,” he reflected forty years later.

His first product worked well on dead hair in the
lab, but proved useless in the salon, on live hair still attached to a sensitive
human scalp. He had therefore to begin all over again. But by 1907 he had his
formula; all that remained was to sell it.

How he summoned up the courage to go out and find
clients he could never afterwards imagine. He was by nature rather shy, and a
very bad salesman. But the product was excellent, and he soon got to know
Paris’s fifty top hairdressers, who formed a respectable core of clients. He
made his products at night, took orders in the morning, and delivered in the
afternoons. By 1909, he had the satisfaction, “which I think I deserved,” of
making a small profit. There were no margins. If he didn’t sell, he didn’t eat.
Every bill, whether for raw materials or household necessities, was a nightmare.
Nevertheless, L’Oréal was a going concern. On the strength of it he allowed
himself to get married, and Mlle. Berthe Doncieux, whom everyone called Betsy,
and of whom we know little save that she was musical and liked to play the piano
and sing,
11
came to share his storage-room
bed.

III

In every town, there will be shops where the scalp
will simply be massaged with lotions, each more wonderful than the last—liquids
that will prevent hair from turning white in the first place.

—E
UGÈNE
S
CHUELLER
,
Coiffure de
Paris
,
1909

A
lthough
Eugène Schueller’s public career is amply documented, the private man remains
elusive. He makes a few cameo appearances in other people’s memoirs. He gave two
short accounts of his life, one in 1948, when he was tried for collaborating
with the Germans, another in 1954, to Merry Bromberger. He produced a few
treatises on politics and economics, and a good many articles and speeches. But
in most of these writings he had one if not both eyes on his own or his
country’s future. He always remained committed to L’Oréal, but as the 1930s
progressed it became more and more the means to an end—an inexhaustible source
of money that would allow him to influence the economic and political scene.

There was little time for private life. The marital
bed crowded out by laboratory and office requirements was as much metaphor as
reality. And although later he surrounded himself with the trappings of
luxury—big houses, a Rolls-Royce, specially commissioned furniture—his lifestyle
remained ascetic. If you work, as he did, from five in the morning until nine at
night, there is little time left for anything else.

We can glimpse his progress in a magazine called
Coiffure de Paris
, whose first issue, in October
1909, declared that it was “distributed free to Wholesale Buyers and to
principal Practitioners in the Five Corners of the World.” A double-page
photo-spread of founders’ portraits showed a cluster of well-set-up gentlemen of
a certain age, with neat gray beards. In this portly and expansive company, E.
Schueller, listed as one of the magazine’s “independent corporate publicists,”
was noticeable for his youth and his abundant black, curly locks. Confined to
the bottom right-hand corner of the page, he was seemingly a sort of
afterthought. But this placement was deceptive. He was one of the magazine’s
moving spirits. A hairdresser of his acquaintance had started it at the
suggestion of a journalist, and co-opted Schueller because of his experience
editing the
Grande Revue Scientifique
. Always
publicity-hungry, he saw in it an excellent potential vehicle for his
advertisements: L’Oréal occupied the whole of the back page, the space purchased
at a cheap contributor’s rate. Before long, in a foretaste of events to come, he
had taken the magazine over entirely and become its proprietor, editor, manager,
and publicist.

Coiffure de Paris
, when
it began, was largely about the now lost world of the postiche, the false hair
piece every fashionable woman needed to achieve the bouffant hairstyles then in
vogue (such as the one called “L’Auréole,” the original inspiration for the new
hair dye’s name), necessary to support the vast hats of the period. Much of this
hair came from Asia, though some was also harvested in the depths of
la France profonde
. A tragic photo in the magazine’s
first issue, “Cutting Hair in the Corrèze,” showed one of the avuncular gents
from the frontispiece, a large pair of scissors in one hand, triumphantly
holding on high a thick mane of locks. Its erstwhile owner, shown in back view,
sat crudely shorn on a bench, while to the right of the picture a second girl,
still in possession of her hair, but about to lose it, and on the verge of
tears, was being pushed forward by a grim-faced
maman
, intent on driving a hard bargain. But these were mere
peasants, whose hair was wasted upon the Corrèze. Paris was its true home, where
in studios such as “Postiches d’Art” “a buzzing hive of posticheuses” washed,
colored, and otherwise prepared the raw material.

The art of the postiche consisted in blending it
undetectably with the wearer’s own hair—a complex and time-consuming business
almost impossible to achieve at home. It had largely contributed to the spread
of commercial hairdressing salons, as need overcame the traditional distrust of
that immoral figure, the male hairdresser. And of course satisfactory matching
necessitated a wide range of hair dyes.

Amid the magazine’s fashionable hyperbole—“This
season,
big
hats mean
big
hair”—the title of E. Schueller’s article, “Practical Techniques
for Dyeing Hair,” struck a strictly down-to-earth note. Every month he supplied
a piece on dyeing techniques and dangers, as well as answering readers’
questions. How, for example, should one deal with accidents that left hair green
or purple? “This happens because you don’t know about hair dye, as you prove
when you say ‘I tried in vain to dye it again.’ That’s just what you mustn’t do.
When hair turns green, you don’t dye it again, you remove the dye that’s already
there. What you’re doing isn’t colouring, it’s interior decorating—applying
coats of plaster.”

Schueller’s dynamism soon put him in charge of
Coiffure de Paris
. And that same year, 1909,
L’Oréal, too, was financially transformed. One of Eugène’s cousins gave him an
introduction to an accountant by the name of Sperry who worked for the liqueur
firm Cusenier in Epernay. Sperry had just come into a small inheritance of
25,000 francs which he was looking to invest. Impressed by Schueller’s evident
intelligence and excited certainty, he agreed to set up a joint venture,
Schueller et Sperry. He insisted, however, on a special safety clause. At the
end of each year Sperry was entitled to withdraw if he chose, and if he did,
Schueller would repay his 25,000 francs. The clause was never invoked. On the
contrary, when Sperry became ill some years later and had to retire, Schueller,
grateful for the the help Sperry had given him when he needed it, suspended it
and paid Sperry’s full share of the annual profits (by then exceeding 25,000
francs) every year until he died.