Section
The Trade
The salon, the counter, the copywriter and the invention of an industry
Beauty became a trade before it became an industry. Both happened faster than most accounts allow.
- 01
The invention of the beauty industry as an industry
Cosmetics existed for millennia. An industry did not. It was built in about forty years by a small number of people, several of whom were outsiders.
- 02
The salon as a civic space
The salon is a shop, a workplace and something harder to name: a room where people sit still, in company, for an hour, and talk.
- 03
The barber, the surgeon and the pole
For centuries the man who cut your hair also let your blood and pulled your teeth. The separation, when it came, was a matter of guild politics.
- 04
The language of beauty copywriting, and where its words came from
Radiance, purity, renewal, clinically proven, dermatologically tested. Each of these has a traceable origin, and several mean less than they appear to.
- 05
The beauty counter, and how a shop fitting made a category
The ground floor cosmetics hall is a piece of retail engineering. Its layout explains the industry's economics better than any annual report.
- 06
Secret recipes, patents and the trade in formulae
A patent requires you to publish. A secret requires you to keep quiet. The cosmetics industry has generally chosen quiet, and the reasons are instructive.
- 07
The hairdresser: a social history of a trade
Wigmakers, waving machines, apprenticeships and a geometric cut. The hairdressing trade has reinvented itself roughly every forty years.
The Gazette, four times a year
One long letter a quarter: what we have been reading, what turned out to be untrue, and what is worth going to see. No selling, because we have nothing to sell you.
Sponsor lineEach issue carries one sponsor line, labelled as such and set apart from the writing. Sponsors are shown the rate card, never the copy. See the rate card.