Beauty for Sale
1933 film by Richard Boleslawski

Beauty for Sale is a 1933 American pre-Code film about the romantic entanglements of three beauty salon employees. Based on the 1933 novel Beauty by Faith Baldwin, it stars Madge Evans, Alice Brady, Otto Kruger and Una Merkel.
Plot
Small town woman Letty Lawson moves to New York City and lives in a boarding house run by Mrs. Merrick. Eventually she asks her friend and Mrs. Merrick's daughter, Carol, to get her a job at her workplace, an exclusive beauty salon owned by Madame Sonia Barton. Though both Carol and her brother Bill, who is in love with her, warn her that it is not a fit place for a young woman of good character, Letty insists she knows what she is getting into.
After proving herself, Letty is sent on a house call to attend to spoiled, scatterbrained, chatty Mrs. Sherwood. When she leaves, she discovers her hat has been chewed up by Mrs.
“Beauty for Sale” enters the record as 1933 film by Richard Boleslawski. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Beauty, Sale and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Beauty for Sale” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Beauty, Sale and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4877938. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beauty for Sale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.