Lash Lure: The Eyelash Dye That Built the FDA

Hazel Fay Brown was thirty-two when she walked into a Memphis beauty salon in May 1933 for a $5 service called Lash Lure. The procedure was a permanent eyelash and brow dye, brushed onto the lash line in two coats, marketed as the answer to clumpy cake mascara that smudged at the slightest tear. Forty-eight hours after her appointment, Brown was blind in both eyes. A month later she was dead from septicaemia, the infection having travelled from the ulcers on her corneas into her bloodstream.

Brown’s case was the catalyst, but she was not alone. Sixteen women were medically documented as blinded by Lash Lure between 1932 and 1933. Many more reported severe burns, scarring, and partial vision loss. The active ingredient was para-phenylenediamine (PPD), a coal-tar derivative used since the 1880s as a permanent hair dye. PPD on a scalp can cause contact dermatitis but rarely worse. PPD on the thin tissue around the eye, applied with a small brush at a much higher concentration than hair dye, was something else.

What the regulation actually was in 1933

Almost nothing.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, Theodore Roosevelt’s signature piece of consumer-protection legislation, gave the federal government authority over adulterated or misbranded food and patent medicines. It said nothing about cosmetics. By the early 1930s the cosmetic industry in the United States was worth around $200 million annually, more than double its value at the time the 1906 Act was written, and it was selling lipsticks tinted with mercury, eyelash dyes containing aniline, freckle creams loaded with ammoniated mercury, and depilatories that took skin off along with the hair.

There was no requirement to list ingredients on packaging. There was no requirement to test products before sale. There was no agency with authority to recall a cosmetic regardless of how many people it had hurt. The Food and Drug Administration existed inside the Department of Agriculture, but its mandate stopped at food and drugs in the literal narrow sense of those words.

The FDA’s chief, Walter Campbell, had been pushing for an updated statute since 1928. He kept running into a Congress sympathetic to the powerful patent-medicine and cosmetic lobbies, and into a series of legislative bills that died in committee.

The Chamber of Horrors

What changed the political picture was a single exhibit. In late 1933, with Lash Lure already in the news, Campbell and Ruth deForest Lamb, the FDA’s chief educational officer, assembled what the press soon called the American Chamber of Horrors. The exhibit was a glass case at the FDA’s Washington headquarters and later a travelling display, featuring before-and-after photographs of women blinded by Lash Lure alongside lipstick tubes from a brand called Lash Lure’s competitor, jars of weight-loss pills containing dinitrophenol (which had cooked at least sixty people to death from internal hyperthermia), and a popular thallium-based depilatory cream.

Eleanor Roosevelt visited the exhibit in 1934 and reportedly spent half an hour at the Lash Lure photographs alone. Within weeks she had used a press conference to call for cosmetic regulation by name. The story moved from trade press into mainstream women’s magazines: Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s. The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair gave the Chamber of Horrors a full booth, and the FDA estimated that roughly 150,000 visitors saw it across the run of the fair.

The exhibit became a political object lesson in how cosmetic regulation died at every previous attempt. The Tugwell Bill of 1933, named for Roosevelt’s agriculture undersecretary Rexford Tugwell, was the first serious attempt at a new statute. It failed in 1934, watered down by industry lobbying and finally killed in committee. A second attempt failed in 1935. A third in 1936.

How cake mascara survived the era

The Lash Lure scandal could have damaged the broader eye-makeup category. It did not, in part because a competing product had already established a safer chemistry.

Maybelline’s cake mascara, introduced in 1917 by T. L. Williams for his sister Mabel, used black coal dust and Vaseline mixed into a pressed cake. The user wet a small brush with water (or, infamously, saliva), rubbed the brush against the cake, and brushed the resulting paste onto her lashes. By 1933 the formula had matured to sodium stearate soap with iron oxide pigment, a much cleaner chemistry that washed off with soap and contained nothing actively toxic.

Cake mascara was inconvenient. It needed water to activate, the brush picked up uneven amounts, and the soap base could sting if it migrated into the eye. But it did not blind anyone. The press coverage of Lash Lure, throughout 1933 and 1934, repeatedly drew the contrast: there is a safe way to darken lashes, and there is a way that takes your sight.

The Hollywood studios reinforced the message. Max Factor Sr., whose 1920s cake mascaras had shaped the on-screen look of silent-film actresses through what would become the 1920s flapper eye, used the Lash Lure controversy as a chance to position his studio brand as the medically responsible choice. His son Frank, who built the consumer business in the 1930s, ran ads in 1934 and 1935 explicitly contrasting “Max Factor Cake Mascara” with the “tragic dye products” of the same era.

By 1935 Maybelline was the dominant mass-market brand and cake mascara was the dominant format. The 1930s Hollywood and 1930s silver-screen eye looks of the decade, the high arched brow and the fluttering long lash, were both built on the cake formula. Lash Lure’s chemistry was simply written out of the category.

The Act that finally passed

The political dam broke in 1937. A drug called Elixir Sulfanilamide, sold to treat streptococcal infections, killed 107 people, including 34 children, after the manufacturer dissolved it in diethylene glycol (an antifreeze chemical) without testing the solvent for safety. The deaths were politically usable in a way the Lash Lure deaths, scattered across two years and confined mostly to adult women in beauty salons, had not been.

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act passed in June 1938. It extended FDA jurisdiction to cosmetics for the first time in American history. The Act required pre-market safety substantiation, banned the use of adulterants and poisonous ingredients in cosmetics intended for the area around the eye, and gave the FDA authority to seize products that violated the new standards.

Lash Lure was banned the following year. The Cincinnati company that sold it folded soon after. Hazel Fay Brown’s family received no settlement; the case never went to trial because the company had no assets left to claim.

What we still owe to those sixteen women

The 1938 Act remains the foundation of cosmetic regulation in the United States. It has been amended several times, most recently and significantly by the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act in late 2022, which added registration and adverse-event reporting requirements for the first time in eighty-four years. But the core of the system, the idea that a cosmetic must be safe for its intended use and that there is a federal agency with authority to remove it from sale if it is not, traces back to a glass exhibit case in 1933 and to a woman who walked into a Memphis salon for a $5 eyelash service.

Modern eye-area regulation is strict. PPD remains banned in any product for use on lashes, brows, or eyelid skin. The FDA’s permitted-colour list for eye-area use is narrower than for any other cosmetic category. The Permanent Lashes industry, lash-tinting in salons that started returning to the United States in the 2010s under European Union regulatory standards, runs on vegetable dyes and tested aniline derivatives that bear no chemical relation to the 1933 formula.

The European Union banned PPD in eye-area cosmetics in 2008. Japan banned it in 1980. The American ban dates to 1939.

You can still find PPD in henna-based “black henna” tattoos sold to tourists, an unregulated grey market that occasionally produces contact-dermatitis cases that look very much like Hazel Fay Brown’s first symptoms. The chemistry has not changed in ninety-three years. What changed is the legal architecture around it, built late, built reluctantly, built only after sixteen women lost their sight at $5 a service.