When I was growing up, my mother had a friend who “took care of her skin.” According to my mother, her friend put Pond’s on her face every night, and when she baked, she covered her face with Vaseline to protect it from the heat. I was very impressed with this. I was also impressed with her skin, which was terrific. In those days, which were not that far back, there was very little talk about skin care or skin treatment lines. Simple cold cream was the only product I remember women using.
The first cold cream was made from a formula that included olive oil, rose water and beeswax. It was made by a Greek physician named Galen sometime about 100 A.D. and variations of this formula have been used to the present. But, since Galen, very little news was made in the skin care department, at least in this country, until the 1960s when Dr. Erno Laszlo introduced his “treatment” line. The Transylvanian-born Dr. Laszlo, who, it is claimed, once said that the reason why cosmetic companies so rarely suggested washing the skin was that they hadn’t thought of a way to make a profit out of water, also marketed very expensive products. His admirers said they were worth it and pointed to his clients, some of the world’s richest and most beautiful women, as proof of the superiority of his products. With his antiseptic-looking packaging and product names that began with pH, Laszlo introduced the element of science and thus revolutionized the cosmetic industry.
It was obviously an idea whose time had come because soon thereafter Revlon started selling Eterna 27, which contained progenitin, one of the first of the socalled wonder ingredients, and Clinique began marketing a dermatologist developed skin care system. Another factor that accounts for the new popularity of some of these face creams is that they are more appealing in terms of texture and consistency. The image of a woman with greasy cold cream on her face is no longer valid. Most of the new creams are light and nongreasy, which is a big plus. Currently, sales on skin care products come to more than $2 billion a year. And, as the popularity of skin care products has grown, most cosmetic companies, as you can imagine, have made major commitments to their skin care lines.
