POISONOUS BEAUTY

You think women are suffering at the hands of the beauty industry now? Back in the day we washed our face with arsenic, enameled our skin and put belladonna drops in our eyes to achieve a dewy, doe-eyed look.

When I was New York Editor of French Vogue under then très chic EIC Carine Roitfeld, she let me publish lengthy stories which, at the time would have never see the light of day in an American fashion mag. Like this one, on the late designer Patrick Kelly:

PATRICK KELLY

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May 7, 2025

In 2002, I was working with then-curator and now Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum of Harlem, Thelma Golden, as she developed a retrospective on designer Patrick Kelly at the Brooklyn Museum. Thelma was in the midst of fund raising for the show and asked me to write a contextual piece on Kelly’s work to help bring attention to the project.

Of the many aspects I loved about working with Carine (besides going vintage shopping and watching with awe as she navigated cobblestone streets in vertiginous heels and tight pencil skirts,) foremost was that she gave me carte blanche and endless pages to write about historical fashion and beauty.

This piece, “Poison Beauty/ Natural Beauty” was published in the November 2002 issue in French and illustrated with Dante Rossetti paintings. Advertisers be damned.

FRENCH VOGUE NOVEMBER ISSUE 2002

Poison Beauty/Natural Beauty

Par Liz Goldwyn, avec des recherches complémentaires de Stephanie Lake.

Once the province of prostitutes and princesses, by the late nineteenth-century the use of cosmetics and face paint had spread as far as rural America. Gone were the previous century‘s highly rouged aristocrats of both sexes, whose beauty patches indicated their romantic status and political inclinations. In their place, the most daring Caucasian beauties had skin as pale as pearls and languorous, bedroom eyes. Men were warned about these modern temptresses, but the real danger was to the women themselves. Attaining a mysterious whiteness, if not translucency, to the skin and an enigmatic shine to the eyes necessitated the absorption and ingestion of unregulated chemicals and known poisons.