TOILETRIES FIRST HOLY TRINITY by Karla Stover

Evening in Paris perfume, Cashmere Bouquet soap, and Tangee lipstick

              

I hadn’t received a Vermont Country Store catalogue for a while so when one showed up this week I took a delightful walk down memory lane because---there it was: Evening in Paris perfume. Between the 1920s and 1960s, women bathed with Cashmere Bouquet soap, wore Tangee lipstick, and dabbed Evening in Paris on their pulse points.

Evening in Paris, aka Soir de Paris, was developed around 1926 by Ernest Beaux, a Russian émigré and perfumer who left Russia after the revolution and moved to Paris. There he was able to use his Romanoff contacts to recreate a business. The Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, one of Coco Chanel's companions, arranged a meeting between the two in Cannes late in the summer of 1920. There, Beaux presented his current and former works to Chanel who chose what became Chanel No. 5 as Christmas gifts for her best clients. Chanel, the company, was owned by the Wertheimer family who also owned a cosmetics company called Bourjois. And Bourjois was looking for a perfume that would appeal to the American bourgeoisie—nothing too expensive, however, just something middle-income women could afford. And so Ernest Beaux created a scent that smelled of violets, roses, and carnations, and which dried to a hint of cloves. The perfume was sold in signature, cobalt blue bottles.

In December 1938, the Dallas Morning News ran an ad for “A smart new bottle of Evening in Paris Perfume, with its own, efficient, lasting atomizer” . . . $1.73. The Vermont catalogue price is $79.95. Prices on ebay vary.

Of these three common toiletries, Cashmere Bouquet Soap is the old-timer. In 1806, an English immigrant named William Colgate started a starch, candle, and soap factory which he called William Colgate and Company. When William died, his son, Samuel, took over and, in 1872, introduced Cashmere Bouquet soap, the company’s first “milled, perfumed toilet soap.” The company even went so far as to register the name as a Colgate trademark.

George Luft, the son of a German émigré, was responsible for Tangee products. George grew up in Warsaw, Illinois and attended the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. After graduation in 1894, he worked in small drug stores throughout the west. In 1902, George was married and living in New York. It would be 18 years before he established the George W. Luft Company, Inc. and begin to manufacture pharmaceuticals and “perfume materials.” The name, Tangee, came from the lipstick's tangerine shade, but the product was advertised as “a technical marvel” because “after application the color changed to conform to the complexion of the wearer.”

Lily Langtry touted soap, Elizabeth Taylor advertised perfume, and pictures of Joan Crawford wearing Tangee are on the internet. However, perhaps Yves Saint-Laurent said it all:

"The most beautiful makeup of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy."