Marinello

Marinello built its reputation on skin care, but its catalogs reveal a substantial fragrance business. Alongside familiar floral preparations such as rose, lilac, lavender and violet were proprietary scents with names like Marinello Girl, Nardys, Arvel, and Blue Ameryl. The company sold fragrance in several forms, from dollar bottles of toilet water to a $5 deluxe perfume. Its publicity presented scent as an affordable way for women to express their individual tastes, a theme that fit comfortably alongside founder Ruth Maurer’s writing about women’s independence and professional ambitions.

Image of Ruth Maurer, photo colorized & enhanced by Grace Hummel (Cleopatra's Boudoir)

Maurer began making beauty preparations in La Crosse, Wisconsin, around 1903, and incorporated the Marinello Company in 1904. In her account of the firm’s beginnings, she recalled making face cream in a double boiler over a gas jet in her basement on State Street. She had already patented a suction device for cleansing the skin in 1901 and went on to publish The Skin, Its Care and Treatment under the name Emily Lloyd. A 1930 profile in The Glass Container credited Lloyd with developing the company’s early preparations. Emily Lloyd was Maurer’s pen name, so the trade account and the La Crosse history describe the same founder. Maurer took the company name from Giovanni Marinello, the sixteenth-century Italian author of a treatise on women’s health and beauty. The firm’s elephant emblem, associated with its motto “Power and Wisdom,” eventually appeared on fragrance packaging as well as cosmetics.

By 1914, Marinello made more than fifty preparations, including face powders, creams, hair products, manicure supplies, and perfumes. Its beauty schools taught anatomy, skin care, and sanitation, while affiliated salons gave graduates a place to practice and provided an outlet for the products they had trained with. Department stores and drugstores brought the line to a wider audience. By 1925, Marinello was selling internationally, and late that year the company shifted its main operations to 72 Fifth Avenue in New York. Control subsequently passed to Inecto, and Maurer left in 1929. She returned to the beauty trade in 1930 with Rudemar, which closed in 1933.

image colorized, restored & enhanced by Grace Hummel (Cleopatra's Boudoir).

Marinello’s early fragrance names included Nardys, recorded by 1919, and Arvel, by 1921. The 1922 material lists Marinello Girl and Nardys and also records Idalia and the Floressence line. Other names associated with the range include Charme, Vic, La Crosse Lilac, and Albertus Rose. The toilet-water assortment offered recognizable floral and aromatic choices such as lilac, rose, violet, lavender, jasmine, and carnation alongside the named compositions. Rose, lilac, violet, and Marinello Girl also appear as perfumes, giving customers a choice of format for several of the same scents.

image restored, colorized & enhanced by Grace Hummel (Cleopatra's Boudoir).

Some of Marinello’s advertising paired fragrances with hair color. Egyptian Lily was promoted for silver-haired women in 1922, Blue Ameryl for brunettes in 1923, and Nile Lily for blondes. An introduction to Nile Lily described it as a companion to Blue Ameryl and emphasized its soft, elusive bouquet, comparing it to the fragrance of an imagined tropical flower. The comparison conveyed the character of the scent without identifying its ingredients. Nile Lily was offered in a small purse bottle and as a toilet water. The surviving descriptions leave the relationship between Egyptian Lily and Nile Lily uncertain. One account treats Nile Lily as a later name for Egyptian Lily, while the promotional material introduces Nile Lily as a new fragrance.

image colorized, enhanced & restored by Grace Hummel (Cleopatra's Boudoir).

image colorized, restored & enhanced by Grace Hummel (Cleopatra's Boudoir).

The numbered catalog listings show how Marinello priced and packaged its perfumery. Toilet waters Nos. 719 and 720 each came in eight scents and sold for $1.00. No. 719 included Nardys and Violette in frosted glass bottles, while No. 720 included Marinello Girl. The illustrated Nardys bottle for No. 719 has a tall, faceted body and a broad, fan-shaped stopper. 

At $1.50, customers could choose among several assortments. No. 740 offered eight perfumes, No. 820 five concentrates, and No. 860 six toilet waters, including Blue Ameryl. No. 880 comprised seven perfumes, while the No. 890 Tri-Essence range listed Charmont, Idalia, Arvel, Rose, Lily, and Violet. The four perfumes in the No. 870 Arvel assortment sold for $2.00. At the top of the listed prices was No. 900, a $5.00 presentation of Blue Ameryl in a deluxe frosted bottle molded with elephant heads.

Fragrance also influenced the packaging of Marinello’s face powder. In 1930, The Glass Container reported that the company had spent more than seven months developing a delicately scented powder that would spread evenly and adhere well. Marinello said its packaging tests showed that cardboard retained some of the fragrance, while glass preserved the scent in the powder. The resulting oval box had fluted sides, a stepped lid, and a flat front for a dull silver label bearing a stylized woman’s profile. Its rose-colored glass coordinated with Marinello’s other jars, whose stepped forms the trade journal likened to modern skyscrapers. The box was designed to look at home on a dressing table and to catch the eye in a department-store window. For Marinello, the perfume in the powder helped determine the form of the container itself.

image enhanced & colorized by Grace Hummel (Cleopatra's Boudoir).