Becoming like the dainty girl
In Edwardian London, a new weight-loss product used marketing messages that remain familiar today.
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Surrounded by regular media coverage of the obesity crisis, articles about celebrity ‘Ozempic face’ and Facebook ads offering supplements and apps to melt the pounds away, one could be forgiven for thinking the weight loss industry was a modern phenomenon.
In 1907, however, when a product called Figuroids launched in London, it joined a growing range of fat-reducing powders, pills and soaps aimed primarily at women. (But no, they did not contain tapeworm eggs.)
The Antipon Company, for example, bottled a solution of citric acid and claimed it would remove ‘a considerable quantity of the most unhealthy fat’ within 24 hours. For decades, Allan’s Anti-Fat, containing an extract of the seaweed Fucus vesiculosis (bladderwrack), had been the ‘celebrated remedy for corpulency.’ Its advertisements in 1879 asked readers to picture the scene:
An exceedingly fat lady puffing like a steam engine, and clinging to the arm of a small wiry gentleman, whose face has become very red either from the unusual exercise or from the consciousness that a hundred eyes are looking at him with a ha! ha! in each pupil.1
Obesity, according to Allan’s Anti-Fat, was a source of shame. The obese woman was meant to recognise herself as an embarrassment and a caricature; the male reader should look at his wife and wonder whether he became an emasculated figure of amusement when in her company.
Nearly 30 years later, the US brand Marmola placed an advert disguised as a news snippet in the London Daily Mail, going even further to make potential customers sufficiently unhappy with their bodies:
IS FATNESS A SOCIAL OFFENCE? "The female form, being capable of expressing a supreme degree of grace, should be an inspiration to our daily lives and lead up to higher ideals of beauty.” said an art lecturer lately. Therefore the fat woman is an enemy to the artistic uplift, for she is entirely too heavy for any wings of fancy to raise.2
Marmola’s advertising presented the product as just one ingredient in a homespun weight-loss recipe that could be made up by any pharmacist. Unlike its mostly harmless and ineffective contemporaries, it contained desiccated animal thyroid material that might cause some weight loss but had a risk of side effects.
George Dixon, managing director of the Figuroid Company, took a different marketing tack. Rather than laughing at his audience or insulting them, he flattered their reason and common sense. The unique selling point of Figuroids was science – they had been ‘DISCOVERED THROUGH AN ACCIDENT, while making Scientific Investigations in the Laboratory’ – unlike their ignorant and out-of-date rivals.
Dixon was already successful in the patent medicine business. A qualified doctor from Brockville, Ontario, he had moved to England in the mid-1890s and promoted Dr Campbell’s Red Blood Forming Capsuloids, a haemoglobin preparation to treat anaemia. With a new century approaching, he changed the old-fashioned name to Capsuloids, making £497 17s 6d in 1899. The new brand targeted baldness (just in case male readers are feeling left out of the advertising pressure).
The Figuroid Company, established in November 1907, claimed that its ‘Gentle, Scientific, Natural and Absolutely Safe Obesity Cure’, started a process in the body to metabolise the fat away.
‘This leaflet is for those who think and reason and use their common sense,’ proclaimed an advertising pamphlet in the Girl’s Own Paper in December that year.3
Other anti-fat remedies, the pamphlet said, promised to shrink fat within the body or somehow render it non-existent. Only those who ‘do not use their common sense’ would believe this. As Figuroids’ readers would understand, no weight loss could occur unless fat was removed from the body altogether – and this could only happen if it were transferred from the adipose cells to the capillaries, and there oxidised for excretion.
Exactly how Figuroids accomplished this wasn’t clear, but the pamphlet would supposedly equip the reader to ‘explain it all scientifically to your friends.’ Before, during and after diagrams illustrated how the fat cells would shrink once Figuroids had done their work.
Underlying the scientific veneer, however, was a subtle appeal to the reader to feel disgust at her own body. The pamphlet’s focus on science did not allow for comment on art and aesthetics, but the unhealthy biological processes endured by the overweight person gave scope for inducing self-loathing.
In Figuroids’ ‘scientific’ view of the fat person, sweaty, red and shiny skin formed the unattractive exterior to a body full of acidic blood, its water content forced out of constricted capillaries. Gout and rheumatism pained the joints, dilated fat cells blocked the circulation and palpitations pounded through the heart’s coating of fat. The reader was asked repeatedly to ‘look again at the diagrams’ and picture what was happening under her skin.
The illustration used in Figuroids’ adverts showed three figures – the same woman in her ‘stout’, ‘medium’ and ‘dainty’ incarnations. Although the copy did not exclude male customers, sometimes referring to the distribution of fat in male bodies too, the aspirational shrinkage in the illustration showed women the ideal to which they should strive.
‘IF you are like the STOUT girl—you will become like the MEDIUM girl—and finally like the DAINTY girl—by taking Figuroids.’
In 1908, the focus on science slipped. French women visiting the Franco-British Exhibition sported a new fashion – the sheath dress. The Figuroid Company seized the opportunity to use the visitors’ elegant image to convince portly Brits to shape up. An unillustrated advert began, in the Marmola style, as a news story. The headline asked ‘Can Stout Women Wear the Sheath Gown?’
A fat person can only wear what suits her own figure, and frequently suspects that her unfashionable attire and awkward personal appearance are the cause of much of the tittering she happens to overhear. This is a distressing condition for a woman to have to endure. The lithe, vivacious movements of her friend, attired in the latest fashionable gown, make her more and more desirous, like Hamlet, “that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew.4
The answer to the headline was, of course, yes, provided the stout women used Figuroids to slim down first.
The reader, whether overweight or not, is prompted to think any laughter is directed at her. Maybe her body is repulsive. Maybe her clothes look awful. Even her personality is suspect – she lacks the vivacity of her slim friend. The only accepted response is to melt away.
Figuroids were attractively presented. Each tablet bore the product name and was wrapped in silver paper, but the product within was useless. An analysis by the British Medical Association in 1908 revealed that they comprised bicarbonate of soda, tartaric acid, sodium chloride, phenolphthalein, hexamethyline-tetramine, talc and gum – none of which had any application for obesity.5 Dropped into water, they made an interesting pink fizzy drink, but that was about it.
Figuroids might have been promoted through a lens of science and rationality, but they were ineffective. And underneath the attractive exterior lurked the advertising message with which we all remain familiar – you need to buy this product because you are not good enough.