Famous Beauties Tell Their Beauty Secrets, 1967

Massages, sex, creams, and false eyelashes

Before I get into today’s newsletter, just a few words on Richard Simmons, who passed away yesterday at 76 (July 12, 1948 – July 13, 2024). Last year I wrote four newsletters covering different, undiscussed aspects of his life and career: his creation of the “Richard Simmons” persona; the jewelry line he designed in 1972 for the likes of Rudi Gernreich; the interior design of his gym, Anatomy Asylum, and its salad bar, Ruffage; and the plus-size activewear line he had in the 1980s.

Richard was beloved by generations of Americans, as the many notes of sadness and loss on social media make clear. He was a complicated, interesting character—one who put so much of himself into others that he eventually had to go into hiding to find some time and space for himself. I hope the last decade was as tranquil as possible and that he is now at peace.

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Famous Beauties Tell Their Beauty Secrets…

I love historic beauty advice, the more nonsensical and seemingly random the better. Beauty advice from celebrities is even better, if from the years prior to the predominance of product placements and spokesmodels. Today, with almost every model and celebrity both a beauty entrepreneur and an influencer shilling on Instagram—and with very few willing to admit to the syringes and surgeries that aid their beauty maintenance—it can feel almost impossible to find celebrity beauty advice that isn’t somehow in payment to one corporation or another. This compendium of guidance (published in Cosmopolitan, May 1967) is before all of that. Half the women name specific products, but not ones they aren’t paid to (the closest would be Lynn Revson naming a Revlon blush); Stella Stevens, who was in Coppertone’s ads at the time, recommended making love and fencing rather than tanning oil.

Most of the advice is quite sensible and normal—though with a very late 1960s preference for false eyelashes and hairpieces—but it is important to note the limits of this group. The thirty-seven women questioned here range in age from 21 (Candice Bergen) to Joan Crawford (anywhere from 59 to 63, depending on which birth year you believe); the majority were in their 20s and 30s. Almost all were white; there was one Black (Mary Wilson of the Supremes), one Asian (China Machado), and one Latina (Raquel Welch). Most were blonde. All were thin. There is no denying that this list is an exceptionally narrow selection of “famous beauties.” What the choices reveal is just how limited Helen Gurley Brown’s vision of the aspirational “Cosmo Girl” was—but then this is an editor-in-chief who first put a Black woman on the cover in 1969 and very sparingly thereafter—and I do not know of a single Asian woman to grace the cover during her 32-year tenure.

While Brown spoke of how the Cosmopolitan cover girl—buxom, beautiful, perfectly coiffed and made up—was “one kind of Cosmo Girl,” she continued that “there are only thirteen of those in the world. Millions of other Cosmo women also look nice but they can be a doctor, lawyer, librarian, computer programmer, lab technician, TV-show coordinator, flight attendant” (1972, quoted in Jennifer Scanlon’s 2009 biography of HGB, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, the Woman Behind Cosmopolitan Magazine, the best and most rigorous of all the bios). A Cosmo girl could have any job, but who she looked to in an aspirational manner—whether a model on the cover or a celebrity in the pages—was white. I’ve read three biographies of HGB and none of them have interrogated the lack of racial diversity on the covers and pages of Brown’s Cosmopolitan; therefore, I do not know if the limited palette was an expressed rule or a more covert one.

Returning to the beauty advice below, this is just for fun. I’d personally like to follow Natalie Wood’s example of saunas and massages…

An earlier post on celebrity beauty books:

And one on a celebrity beauty line:

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Famous Beauties Tell Their Beauty Secrets

Each has a special routine or product she couldn't live without… No, they don't bathe in milk or sleep sixteen hours a night—almost everything they do, you can do, too! By Diane Judge

Audrey Hepburn, Star of Motion Picture Wait Until Dark

"If I could only have one thing, I guess it would be a bar of soap."