Although she is far from the first to do it, Gwyneth Paltrow has made bank on the idea that women can achieve beauty like hers by simply buying her Goop brand wellness products to transform one's body inside and out. More than 100 years ago, another attractive blonde became fabulously wealthy in much the same way. Madame Yale developed and sold products backed by questionable scientific claims and savvy marketing.
Madame Yale rose to fame during a boom era for female beauty entrepreneurs, shortly before Elizabeth Arden and Estée Lauder, whose makeup empires endure today. But Madame Yale stood apart from these makeup moguls by promising to transform women from the inside out, rather than helping them hide their imperfections. That was itself an ingenious ploy: Because wearing visible makeup remained a questionable moral choice in the period, many women flocked to Yale’s product offerings, hoping to become so naturally flawless they wouldn’t need to paint their faces. In the 1890s, her business had an estimated value of $500,000—around $15 million in today’s money.
In the archives of the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, among yellowed advertisements for cocaine-infused toothache drops and opium-soaked tampons, I found a tattered promotional pamphlet for the centerpiece of Yale’s business—Fruitcura, the product she advertised most widely. Madame Yale said she had come upon the elixir during a dark period, recalling “my cheeks were sunken, eyes hollow and vacant in expression, and my complexion was to all appearances hopelessly ruined. My suffering was almost unbearable.” She also noted that “physicians had long before pronounced me beyond their aid.” But when she imbibed Fruitcura regularly after “discovering” it at age 38, she “emerged from a life of despair into an existence of sunshine and renewed sensations of youth.” In Yale’s account, sharing Fruitcura with her “sisters in misery” (that is, selling it to them) was now her almost sacred purpose.
Read about the rise and fall of Madame Yale and what her story says about the pressures women operate under at Smithsonian.