Depictions of
Madame Yale
often suggested
that she had a
hand in crafting
her concoctions.ARCHIVEPHOTOS/^
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14 SMITHSONIAN.COM | March 2020that included Helen of Troy, the Roman goddess Di-
ana and, apparently, Madame Yale.
The sermon was her 11th public appearance in Bos-
ton in recent years, and it also covered the various lo-
tions and potions—products that Yale just happened
to sell—that she said had transformed her from a sal-
low, fat, exhausted woman into the beauty who stood
on stage: her tall, hourglass fi gure draped at one point
in cascading white silk, her blond ringlets falling
around a rosy-cheeked, heart-shaped face. Applause
thundered. The Boston Herald praised her “off er of
Health and Beauty” in a country where “every woman
wants to be well and well-looking.”
Madame Yale had been delivering “Beauty Talks”
coast to coast since 1892, cannily promoting herself
in ways that would be familiar to consumers in 2020.
She was a true pioneer in what business gurus would
call the wellness space—a roughly $4.5 trillion in-
dustry globally today —and that achievement alone
should command attention. Curiously, though, she
went from celebrated to infamous virtually overnight,
and her story, largely overlooked by historians, is all
the more captivating as a cautionary tale.
Day after day, online, in print, on TV and on social
media, women are inundated with advertisements
for wellness products that promise to fi x our skin and
our digestion and our hair and our mood seemingly
at once. The (almost always) attractive women behind
these products position themselves as uniquely mod-
ern innovators at the cutting edge of holistic healthand beauty. But my research sug-
gests Madame Yale, born Maude
Mayberg in 1852, was using the
same techniques more than a cen-
tury ago. Think of her as the spir-
itual godmother of Gwyneth Pal-
trow, founder of the $250 million
Goop corporation.
Like Paltrow, Madame Yale was
an attractive blond white wom-
an—“as beautiful as it is possible
for a woman to be,” the New Orle-
ans Picayune said, and the “most
marvelous woman known to the
Earth since Helen of Troy,” accord-
ing to the Buff alo Times. Paltrow’s
company markets “UMA Beauty
Boosting Day Face Oil,” “Goop-
Glow Inside Out Glow Kit” and “G.
Tox Malachite + AHA Pore Refi n-
ing Tonic.” Madame Yale hawked
“Skin Food,” “Elixir of Beauty” and
“Yale’s Magical Secret.” Paltrow is
behind a slick periodical, Goop , that is part wellness
magazine and part product catalog. Madame Yale’s
Guide to Beauty, fi rst published in 1894, is a self-help
book that promotes her products. Both women have
aspired to an unattainable ideal of biochemical puri-
ty. Goop claims its G.Tox will “increase cell turnover
and detoxify pores.” Madame Yale said her “Blood
Tonic” would “drive impurities from the system as
the rain drives the debris along the gutters.” And
both, importantly, embodied their brands, present-
ing themselves as the best possible evidence of their
effi cacy, though Madame Yale, living in a simpler
time before digital media (there are thousands of
pictures of Paltrow available online), was far more
explicit about it. (Goop did not respond to multiple
requests for comment.)
Madame Yale rose to fame during a boom era for
female beauty entrepreneurs, shortly before Elizabeth
Arden and Estée Lauder, whose makeup empires en-
dure today. But Madame Yale stood apart from these
makeup moguls by promising to transform women
from the inside out, rather than helping them hide
their imperfections. That was itself an ingenious ploy:
Because wearing visible makeup remained a ques-
tionable moral choice in the period, many women
fl ocked to Yale’s product off erings, hoping to become
so naturally fl awless they wouldn’t need to paint their
faces. In the 1890s, her business had an estimated val-
ue of $500,000—around $15 million in today’s money.
In the archives of the New Orleans PharmacyWELLNESS