“Ladies, if your plans for making yourself more beautiful during the holiday season include a certain radium treatment, you’re bound to be disappointed.”
So began a broadcast of the United States Department of Agriculture during a weekly radio show in November 1935 before continuing to report that a shipment of an unspecified radium based cosmetic product had been seized for making medical claims.
This short announcement gives an insight into how far attitudes towards radium, the so-called medical miracle of the early 20th century, had changed in the decades after its discovery and also into one of the many commercial applications of radium—beauty.
The isolation of radium, in 1898, by scientists Marie Skłodowska Curie and Pierre Curie quickly captured public imagination. Due to its initial rarity, radium was referred to as the most expensive substance in the world. Its mysterious and strange properties were picked apart by newspapers. In the theatre it might be found as part of a costume, a song or a type of dance. One of the most exciting prospects was radium showed potential as a super medicine, a cure for the most feared diseases of all—cancer and tuberculosis. It was also hailed, by a newly emerging mass-market beauty industry, as the savior to a particular set of problems including wrinkles, excess hair and crows-feet.
“Radium” (both as a word and as a rather under-defined concept) was used to confer a veneer of scientific excitement as well as signifying technological advancements even in products that didn’t have any real association with the substance and certainly didn’t advertise it as an ingredient. For companies wishing to make a case for their modernity radium was an obvious choice for research and development purposes. After all, it was a product of modern science created in a Nobel Prize-winning laboratory.
In the US, beauty preparations aligning themselves with radium began to appear in the midpoint of the first decade of the 20th century. In 1906 Moss Morris, an entrepreneur from Brooklyn, filed the trademark “Radium Bay” with the US Patent Office. The product was a tonic for the hair. Soon after the Radio-Sulpho Company of Denver, Colorado, marketed their Radio-Sulpho Brew (a home cure for Uric acid and Rheumatism) as well as “creams, powder, pills and hair tonics.” Radio-X Greaseless Complexion Cream and Complexion Soap was one of the range of products offered by the Radium Remedies Company. Radio-X even boasted a celebrity endorser: the singer Al Jolson, who claimed that their Healing Pads “worked wonders” for his throat.