Powered By Csillag

Anna Csillag was an early business woman and obviously a master of marketing, too, for her ubiquitous advertisements made her so well-known all across the Habsburg empire of the Belle Époque that for the Polish writer Bruno Schulz she was similarly representative for the era as emperor Franz Joseph.

Csillag sold cosmetic articles of all sorts, but what made her famous was her self-made hair-growing tincture. In his marvellous book »Goodbye Eastern Europe«, Jacob Mikanowski writes:

Anna stumbled upon a truly miraculous medicine that not only cured her baldness but worked as a sort of hair-growing wonder drug. […] Soon all the men in her family likewise boasted astounding pelts of lustrous black hair – fanlike beards stretching past their waists, and ropelike mustachios coiled around their trunks and midsections like so many boa constrictors.

A tragic twist is that among those who were impressed and, alas, inspired by Csillag’s marketing techniques was none other than a certain mediocre art student in Vienna …