ABSTRACT
At the turn of the twentieth century, when Suzanne and Henry first moved to Paris, a dynamic shift was beginning to take place in the way that people thought about beauty. Evident in Paris was the formation of a “beauty culture” that had taken hold in a newly consumerized market. 1 Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, this new cultural movement would grow quickly and have direct consequences not only for women in general, but for Suzanne as it paralleled the progression of the modernization of the field of cosmetic surgery. French society has a long and dynamic history when it comes to the idea of improving on one’s personal appearance. One of the earliest cosmetic surgery procedures performed on a woman in France, for example, was executed by Dr. Ambroise Paré in 1562, when a wealthy aristocratic woman underwent surgery to have one of her decaying front teeth extracted and replaced with a tooth “donated” by one of her servants. By the mid-eighteenth century, cosmetic dentistry in the form of tooth transplantations was much more commonplace despite the somewhat dubious results, not to mention the risk of contracting syphilis and other diseases from the donor. 2 Nonetheless, it was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, at the court of Louis XIV, where the aristocratic classes vigorously competed with each other when it came to displaying themselves at court, that set France solidly on a path that increasingly pointed to a culture of beauty. Eventually, cosmetics and fashion styles long employed by elite women filtered down in one form or another to the middle classes. As early as the late eighteenth century, for example, beauty products were aggressively advertised and sold from marketplace stalls to elegant Parisian stores, and cosmetics were purchased, in increasingly large quantities, by women regardless of their social status. 3 However, something unique in regard to beauty was taking place by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that fundamentally changed the way people thought about beauty, as female attractiveness became more important than ever before. But as new expectations in regard to beauty grew, so too did the consequences of those expectations.
