Madame Rachel and the Secrets of Bond Street

Sarah Rachel Leverson traded as Madame Rachel from 47a New Bond Street, one of the most expensive shopping streets in London. What she sold was the idea that beauty had a secret and that she held it: some sixty preparations, marketed as the beauty secrets of ancient Arabia and the harem.^[1]

She is remembered for how the business ended, in prosecutions for fraud at the Old Bailey in 1868 and again in 1878.^[1] She is worth remembering for what the business shows about a trade with almost no rules.

The heart of the business was enamelling: making a face over into a smooth, opaque surface. Her biographer treats the Bond Street premises as exactly that kind of establishment, applying and selling preparations under exotic names at the very top of the market.^[2]

The fashionable Victorian complexion was meant to look unpainted, which made the trade in painting it discreet by necessity. A client who wanted an enamelled face also wanted nobody to know she had paid for one, and discretion was part of what she was buying.

The exotic framing did the commercial work. Arabian and harem names tied the preparations to a fantasy of hidden knowledge, and made their price look like the cost of admission rather than the cost of ingredients.^[3]

It was not an original move, and it has never gone away. A borrowed pedigree, from a distant place or a famous name, is one of the oldest devices in the trade, and it works best exactly where a customer has no way of checking it.

The prosecutions of 1868 and 1878 were for fraud, and it matters what they were not. They were not brought under any law governing cosmetics, because there was none to bring them under. The Pharmacy Act passed in 1868 restricted who could keep and sell scheduled poisons; it did not regulate what a cosmetic contained.^[4] A cosmetic seller in Victorian Britain could be reached through the general law of deception, not through her products.

The court record is what survives best of her, and her biographer leans on it for that reason: it documents the business without depending on anything she said about herself.^[5] She served prison sentences, and she died in Woking gaol in 1880.^[6]

What her preparations contained. The sources cited here document the premises, the brand names and the prosecutions; they do not supply formulations.^[7] Nor can anyone now say how many of her clients were satisfied, which is the one question a fraud prosecution never asks.