Spanish explorer Pone de Leon may have searched in vain for the fabled Fountain of Youth but Cora Galenti knew the thing to do was to promote it into being.
In the post WWII era Galenti built a Hollywood-based skin care company and spa, primarily as the pioneer of deep chemical face peels. It may not have been the Fountain of Youth but is was a means by which thousands of her clients enjoyed the benefits of a new and youthful appearance.
Galenti defied the plastic surgery establishment with her formula for facial rejuvenation, guaranteed to take 10 to 20 years off wrinkled faces. Mysterious though as it was, her peel quickly became the fastest growing successful nonsurgical procedure of the 1950's and to this day maintains its position in the field of cosmetic surgery, as one of the most effective techniques for facial rejuvenation.
In the fifties it was a new process and thus an unregulated field until a group of physicians who first tried unsuccessfully to obtain Galenti's formula, did endorse it as a medical rather than cosmetic procedure.
Cora Galenti was born in a Sicilian village near Catania and grew up in New York. Later she served as an apprentice in her mother's fashion design company, the worked for a prominent Chicago-dress designer and for Paramount and 20th Century Fox studios in Hollywood, where Galenti draped and swathed a series of glamorous stars. Those same stars became her first clients for Galenti had brought with her a formula to remove wrinkles that had been used by women in her family for several generations.
In Hollywood Galenti meet Antoinette LaGasse, an elderly African.-American who was experimenting with a simple formula to lighten skin color. Antoinette encouraged Cora to further enhance the Sicilian formula and after much experimentation refined her deep chemical face peeling formula rendering it perfect for commercial application.
After successfully treating two elderly Fox studio hairstylists with the formula, Galenti, a beautiful and youthful grandmother, soon drew a flock of celebrities impressed with the results of her treatment, vainly seeking, if not youth, wrinkle-free old age.
Actress Marlene Dietrich - one of the few celebrities willing to admit having her wrinkles removed by Galenti - -earned the moniker "The World's Sexiest Grandmother." Other clients who never seemed to age on screen were Loretta Young, Irene Dunn, Ginger Rogers, George Raft, Barbara Stanwyck, Victor Mature and Bob Cummings.
Moving to the Hollwood Hills, she offered a $3,000 miracle with as three-week sojourn at her three story, 23-room villa, perched on three acres overlooking Hollywood on Courtney Avenue. Clients relaxed as Cora's formula exfoliated layers of skin. Recovering clients were pampered with healthful foods in luxurious surroundings.
Galenti's business got a boost when a 1956 issue of Confidential magazine featured her seductive before and after unretouched photographs of clients whose wrinkles disappeared. The article was entitled "New Faces For Old Without Surgery."
Inundated with patients, Cora treated scores of paying customers weekly while continuing to offer her peel free to scared war veterans, indigent clergymen, seniors, and acne plagued young adults who made up 20 percent of her clientele.
Long ignored by skeptical medical professionals, Galenti soon found her waiting room filled with FDA, Better Business Bureau and Board of Medical Examiner investigators, Dermatologists and Plastic Surgeons, all wanting to witness her quick fix for aging faces. Walking out, one muttered: "I see the remarkable results, but I am from Missouri, I don't want to believe them."
Surprising Results
Soon a group of local physicians headed by Adolph Brown resurrected long abandoned research on phenol - only one of the key ingredients in the Galenti formula, and conducted tests of their own. What Brown found convinced him not only that a phenol peel was a useful tool, but that Galenti's results were far superior to his experiments. Additional experimentation began at the University of Miami by Dr. G. Baker. However, it is the conclusion of numerous investigators that to this day the original Galenti formula has never been duplicated and that her process remains the international standard for deep face peeling.
In the late sixties Cora opened a clinic and spa in Mexico City where her remarkable and unique deep peels continue to draw the beautiful, the aging and the vain from around the world. Today patients are treated by physicians at the Galenti clinics in Monterrey, Mexico, Guadalajara, and Mexico City and her deep face peel maintains its position as the most effective technique for facial rejuvenation by which all similar treatments must be judged.
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