Hey folks, Aaron here.

Before we begin, just a heads up that today's episode contains the story of a traumatic

birth.

Listener discretion is advised.

Tinkering in his small shop just off Broadway, Joseph Trust was busy concocting skin creams and

making promises. He was going to make women beautiful, after all, and himself rich in the process,

and he would do both of those things through manipulation and deceit. Joseph did this by transforming

himself into an alter ego, Felix Gourod, a chemist and

doctor. But behind this sophisticated facade was a difficult snake oil salesman and general scoundrel

about town, to those who really knew him, and there weren't many. He was less of a Superman and

Clark Kent, and more of a Jekyll and

hide. One of his items, though, was a canary in the coal mine for the changing times.

On August 8th of 1840, he advertised a woman's hair removal powder on the front page of the New York

Daily Herald. He wrote, we could never think of falling in love with a woman whose fuzzy face bears a resemblance

to the back of a half-pick goose and wonder how anyone else ever could. But ladies removing

their body hair wasn't anything new, of course, and can be traced back thousands of years

to civilizations across the world.

Egyptian women sometimes removed their head and pubic hair.

Elizabethan women did away with their eyebrows.

Ancient Romans used a myriad of pumice stones and tweezers that were at a lady's disposal.

In America, though, female hair removal had yet to be commodified and institutionalized. But then, that all started to change.

In 1880, the King Camp Gillette Company created the first modern razor. It appeared at a time when the upper and middle class continued their efforts by separating themselves from the working class.

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