MADAME RACHEL OF BOND STREET
Born Sarah Rachel Russell (Born 1814, Died 12 0ctober 1880.)
Madame Rachel had started life in the East End as plain Sarah Russell, selling old clothes and hawking bottles and rabbit skins from a barrow in Wapping, before graduating to running a fried fish shop in Clare Market, an area just off the Strand that is now the location of the London School of Economics. When money was short she told fortunes for a penny around the public houses of Covent Garden and helped procure actresses from Drury Lane’s theatres for a brothel run by one of her friends off Long Acre. Some time in the 1850s she turned to making and selling hair dyes; so successful was she that she quickly moved up market for the richer pickings to be found as a cosmetician in Bond Street. ‘Beautiful For Ever’, became Rachel’s clever marketing catchphrase, by means of which she traded on the gullibility of rich women willing to suspend their disbelief and pay through the nose for items from a range of sixty cosmetics that she claimed were based on the exotic beauty secrets of Ancient Arabia and the harem.
In the 1860s, British women who wanted to wear makeup had to do so on the downlow. In a decree that absolutely no one asked for, Queen Victoria declared skin cosmetics to be vulgar and unladylike, fit only for the theater or the brothel. The only socially acceptable way to alter your appearance was to pinch your cheeks and bite your lips and get by with good genes and the ephemeral hue of your own blood. Women who longed for something more might craft their own cosmetics at home, and frequently had to rely on unsavory ingredients such as arsenic. So when Madame Rachel opened up shop, society ladies couldn't queue up fast enough.
Unsurprising for someone peddling putative elixirs and powders from exotic locales, Madame Rachel dressed in an appropriative pastiche, according to Rappaport’s book. She wore lush robes, dripping jewels, and crystal talismans around her neck.
Inside each of her powders and creams and washes, of course, lurked a toxic cocktail of chemicals. If something had the power to burn off the skin of your face or poison your mind, Madame Rachel probably sold it. Her most-used ingredients included prussic acid, lead carbonate, and, of course, arsenic.
Madame Rachel’s most sought after stock in trade, for which she claimed unique talents, was the ‘enamelling of ladies’ faces’, a method for lightening the skin to a then fashionable whiteness. Although by no means original to her, ‘enamelling’ became for ever after associated with Rachel’s notoriety. The objective was the age-old one of producing a smooth and transparently white porcelain quality to the face and bosom for that special ball or dinner or presentation at court and one whose effects could last – so Rachel claimed – for up to a year. In her seductive advertising campaign enamelling was elevated to an almost occult art, which she claimed was conducive to health and beauty, grace and youth, and one that was exclusively hers. But it didn’t come cheap: her average charge for enamelling a lady’s face was twenty guineas – something like £1,500 today. The method was simple enough – a careful removal of hairs or fuzz on the face and bust by the use of various lotions; followed by the application of copious amounts of alkaline toilet washes, then a filling-in of wrinkles and depressions in the skin with a thick white paste, and a dusting of rouge and powder to finish off.
Beyond her beauty scams, Rachel ran a series of other money-making schemes that didn’t sit quite right with the law. She regularly blackmailed women who couldn’t pay up front, by offering them credit and later extorting them and pawning their jewels, according to the court transcript. Inevitably, Rachel ran into the law as former clients levied numerous suits of malpractice and intimidation. Some even accused her of providing abortion-inducing drugs or running a brothel above her shop.
Born Sarah Rachel Russell (Born 1814, Died 12 0ctober 1880.)
Madame Rachel had started life in the East End as plain Sarah Russell, selling old clothes and hawking bottles and rabbit skins from a barrow in Wapping, before graduating to running a fried fish shop in Clare Market, an area just off the Strand that is now the location of the London School of Economics. When money was short she told fortunes for a penny around the public houses of Covent Garden and helped procure actresses from Drury Lane’s theatres for a brothel run by one of her friends off Long Acre. Some time in the 1850s she turned to making and selling hair dyes; so successful was she that she quickly moved up market for the richer pickings to be found as a cosmetician in Bond Street. ‘Beautiful For Ever’, became Rachel’s clever marketing catchphrase, by means of which she traded on the gullibility of rich women willing to suspend their disbelief and pay through the nose for items from a range of sixty cosmetics that she claimed were based on the exotic beauty secrets of Ancient Arabia and the harem.
In the 1860s, British women who wanted to wear makeup had to do so on the downlow. In a decree that absolutely no one asked for, Queen Victoria declared skin cosmetics to be vulgar and unladylike, fit only for the theater or the brothel. The only socially acceptable way to alter your appearance was to pinch your cheeks and bite your lips and get by with good genes and the ephemeral hue of your own blood. Women who longed for something more might craft their own cosmetics at home, and frequently had to rely on unsavory ingredients such as arsenic. So when Madame Rachel opened up shop, society ladies couldn't queue up fast enough.
Unsurprising for someone peddling putative elixirs and powders from exotic locales, Madame Rachel dressed in an appropriative pastiche, according to Rappaport’s book. She wore lush robes, dripping jewels, and crystal talismans around her neck.
Inside each of her powders and creams and washes, of course, lurked a toxic cocktail of chemicals. If something had the power to burn off the skin of your face or poison your mind, Madame Rachel probably sold it. Her most-used ingredients included prussic acid, lead carbonate, and, of course, arsenic.
Madame Rachel’s most sought after stock in trade, for which she claimed unique talents, was the ‘enamelling of ladies’ faces’, a method for lightening the skin to a then fashionable whiteness. Although by no means original to her, ‘enamelling’ became for ever after associated with Rachel’s notoriety. The objective was the age-old one of producing a smooth and transparently white porcelain quality to the face and bosom for that special ball or dinner or presentation at court and one whose effects could last – so Rachel claimed – for up to a year. In her seductive advertising campaign enamelling was elevated to an almost occult art, which she claimed was conducive to health and beauty, grace and youth, and one that was exclusively hers. But it didn’t come cheap: her average charge for enamelling a lady’s face was twenty guineas – something like £1,500 today. The method was simple enough – a careful removal of hairs or fuzz on the face and bust by the use of various lotions; followed by the application of copious amounts of alkaline toilet washes, then a filling-in of wrinkles and depressions in the skin with a thick white paste, and a dusting of rouge and powder to finish off.
Beyond her beauty scams, Rachel ran a series of other money-making schemes that didn’t sit quite right with the law. She regularly blackmailed women who couldn’t pay up front, by offering them credit and later extorting them and pawning their jewels, according to the court transcript. Inevitably, Rachel ran into the law as former clients levied numerous suits of malpractice and intimidation. Some even accused her of providing abortion-inducing drugs or running a brothel above her shop.
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British tabloids printed viciously offensive anti-Semitic cartoons criticizing Madame Rachel, according to Tammy Whitlock’s article, “The Madame Rachel Case, Fraud, and Retail Trade in 19th-Century England.” As Whitlock notes, she was twice prosecuted for fraud, once in 1868 and again in 1878, and eventually died in jail in 1880, leaving many of her clients to age of natural causes.
She is buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London, her grave is hard to find, and does not have a headstone.
Her daughter Helene Crossmond-Turner was an operatic soprano who overcame the scandal associated with "Madame Rachel" and sang with success in England, America and Italy, notably in the role of Aida in Verdi's opera of the same name. On 22 April 1888, following an argument with the producer, Augustus Harris, over a contract to appear at Covent Garden, in which she tore up the agreement and was replaced by alternative singers, she shot herself in the back of a cab at Piccadilly Circus, later dying at nearby St. George's Hospital.
She is buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London, her grave is hard to find, and does not have a headstone.
Her daughter Helene Crossmond-Turner was an operatic soprano who overcame the scandal associated with "Madame Rachel" and sang with success in England, America and Italy, notably in the role of Aida in Verdi's opera of the same name. On 22 April 1888, following an argument with the producer, Augustus Harris, over a contract to appear at Covent Garden, in which she tore up the agreement and was replaced by alternative singers, she shot herself in the back of a cab at Piccadilly Circus, later dying at nearby St. George's Hospital.
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