Harriet Hubbard Ayer: A Face Cream, a Lawsuit and an Asylum

Harriet Hubbard was born in Chicago in 1849, married Herbert C. Ayer and divorced him, and in 1886 raised fifty thousand dollars of backing to manufacture a face cream in New York.^[1] The Smithsonian's libraries describe the company she founded as the first American cosmetics company.^[2] Whether or not it deserves the title, the story of how she lost it is one of the strangest in the trade.

The product rested on a story. On a visit to Paris she is said to have bought, from a chemist named Mirault, the formula for a cream his grandfather had supposedly made for Madame Récamier, the celebrated beauty of Napoleonic Paris.^[3] The Smithsonian's wording is just as careful: a formula that had reportedly been used by Récamier.^[4]

Every hedge in those accounts is earned. The provenance cannot be checked, and it did not need to be. What the name bought was an aristocratic French pedigree for a jar filled in New York, which is a device the industry has used ever since.

The business did well enough to be worth fighting over. Her backer, James Seymour, sued her, according to one version of events because she had refused his advances.^[5] By 1893 she had lost control of the company.^[6]

What followed reads least like business history. In 1893 she was committed to an asylum at Bronxville, and she was held there into 1894.^[7] After her release she campaigned on the treatment of people confined as insane.^[5]

In 1896 she joined the staff of the New York World, writing a beauty column for the paper's woman's page, and she went on working there as a journalist and editor.^[8] In 1899 she gathered her writing into Harriet Hubbard Ayer's Book: A Complete and Authentic Treatise on the Laws of Health and Beauty, a collection of essays with recipes for cosmetics and advice for healthy living.^[9]

The move from maker to adviser matters for this history. Advice in print became one of the main channels between the trade and its customers, and a former manufacturer writing for a mass-circulation paper carried the counter's knowledge to readers who would never stand at one.^[10]

She died in 1903, of pneumonia. Her name then had a career of its own. Her daughter Margaret sold it, as early as 1904 or as late as 1906, to Vincent Benjamin Thomas, and a business built on it went on selling Harriet Hubbard Ayer products for decades; one careful history of the firm notes that exactly when the sale happened is open to question.^[11]