Thanks to Palmolive’s beauty soap, “Youth is being retained.” Or so promises the ad in this Ladies Home Journal from 1926.

“Modern mothers” (who use these products) compete with their “daughters of debutante age.”

Uh huh.

Studies show that when we read so-called “women’s magazines,” our self-esteem plummets several percentage points. Which is good if you’re an advertiser, because that opens the door to the multi-billion dollar “cures” for ugly. Even more disturbing is the allusion here that age = unattractiveness.

In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes that women’s magazines make their money by selling women on the idea that they’re suffering from a disease of “terminal ugliness.”

While scanning the pages of these early 20th Century women’s magazines, I was aghast to learn that manufacturers of so-called beauty products have been selling “terminal ugliness” for more than 80 years now.

The saddest part is, we keep buying into it.

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