Silicones on the Surface

This chapter focuses on silicone’s complex military-industrial origins and its immediate postwar launch on the commercial market. It examines silicone’s provenance, R & D, and its changing meanings and applications through a variety of archival sources, including oral histories with chemists, chemical engineering textbooks, promotional material from chemical companies, cosmetics advertisements, and magazines. The chapter examines how chemical companies, promoting silicone as inert and as an American miracle of peacetime conversion, repositioned it within domestic, medical, and cosmetic markets. Silicone’s applications are traced from the surface of the skin via cosmetics to inside the body with industrial food production and medical implants.