The remarkable and mysterious Madame Rachel was an infamous ‘enameller of ladies faces’. She assured her Victorian clientele that if they used her miraculous preparations - ‘Circassian wash ... peach blossom cream and alabaster powder, the magnetic rock dew and alabaster liquid, Circassian bloom, Arabian soaps and alabaster liquid’ - they would be ‘Beautiful for Ever’. Of course it was nothing but a ponzi beauty scheme run by an audacious con-artist. She also maintained a second income from blackmailing those aristocratic ladies who had got so far in debt buying her products they dare not tell their husbands how they hoped to maintain their beauty. It was a deadly bind for her victims. Many were divested of every penny and were no longer able to afford the potions they depended on; potions that were ineffective and potentially lethal. Penniless, Madame Rachel had no further use of them. Unlike her subject, Helen Rappaport promises and delivers a fascinating story about one woman’s fight out of poverty by duping the rich, foolish and vain with outlandish claims and audacious publicity masterminded by a charlatan with a genius for fraud.