The global beauty business permeates our lives, influencing how we perceive ourselves and what it is to be beautiful. The brands and firms which have shaped this industry, such as Avon, Coty, Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, and Shiseido, have imagined beauty for us. This book provides the first authoritative history of the global beauty industry from its emergence in the nineteenth century to the present day, exploring how today's global giants grew. It shows how successive generations of entrepreneurs built brands which shaped perceptions of beauty, and the business organizations needed to market them. They democratized access to beauty products, once the privilege of elites, but they also defined the gender and ethnic borders of beauty, and its association with a handful of cities, notably Paris and later New York. The result was a homogenization of beauty ideals throughout the world. Today globalization is changing the beauty industry again; its impact can be seen in a range of competing strategies. Global brands have swept into China, Russia, and India, but at the same time, these brands are having to respond to a far greater diversity of cultures and lifestyles as new markets are opened up worldwide. In the twenty first century, beauty is again being re-imagined anew.

We all know one hard and undeniable truth: Physical beauty comes with tremendous power, and tremendous benefits. Those who possess it are generally luckier in love, more likely to be popular, and more apt to get better grades in school. But very few of us realize just how much looks affect every aspect of our lives. Recent studies document that people blessed with good looks earn about 10% more than their average-looking colleagues. They are also more likely to get hired and promoted at work. What exactly is this “physical attractiveness” phenomenon and how does it affect each and every one of us? Dr. Gordon L. Patzer has devoted the last 30 years to investigating this unsettling phenomenon for both women and men, and how it touches every part of our lives. In Looks, he reveals not only its impact on romance, but also on family dynamics, performance in school, career, courtroom proceedings, politics and government. Looks is the first book to explore how the power of beauty affects both sexes and how the rise of reality TV shows, cosmetic surgery, and celebrity culture have contributed to our culture’s overall obsession with being beautiful. Unflinching and topical, Looks uncovers the sometimes ugly truth about beauty and its profound effects on all of our lives.

From medieval bestiaries to Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, we’ve long been enchanted by extraordinary animals, be they terrifying three-headed dogs or asps impervious to a snake charmer’s song. But bestiaries are more than just zany zoology—they are artful attempts to convey broader beliefs about human beings and the natural order. Today, we no longer fear sea monsters or banshees. But from the infamous honey badger to the giant squid, animals continue to captivate us with the things they can do and the things they cannot, what we know about them and what we don’t. With The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Caspar Henderson offers readers a fascinating, beautifully produced modern-day menagerie. But whereas medieval bestiaries were often based on folklore and myth, the creatures that abound in Henderson’s book—from the axolotl to the zebrafish—are, with one exception, very much with us, albeit sometimes in depleted numbers. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings transports readers to a world of real creatures that seem as if they should be made up—that are somehow more astonishing than anything we might have imagined. The yeti crab, for example, uses its furry claws to farm the bacteria on which it feeds. The waterbear, meanwhile, is among nature’s “extreme survivors,” able to withstand a week unprotected in outer space. These and other strange and surprising species invite readers to reflect on what we value—or fail to value—and what we might change. A powerful combination of wit, cutting-edge natural history, and philosophical meditation, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is an infectious and inspiring celebration of the sheer ingenuity and variety of life in a time of crisis and change.

Breaking down the structure of the photograph as truth and the book as narrative, Joshua Lutz's second monograph, HESITATING BEAUTY, it is an intimate portrait unlike other photographic models. Rethinking how photographs and text can function, Lutz blends family archives, interviews and letters with his own photographic practice seamlessly into a precious, fictitious experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Instead of showing us what it looks like, HESITATING BEAUTY is able to play with our own conceptions of reality to show us what it feels like. Joshua Lutz: ""Holding on so tightly to what I believed was sanity and being consumed by fear of depression and schizophrenia prevented me from being fully present to my mother's reality. The past few years, as she slipped away from the aggressive paranoia and depression of my youth to an almost calming sense of delusion, made it much easier for me to rid the anger that veiled my life and attempt to find a place of empathy and compassion as I managed her care. In making this work and simultaneously falling deeper into her psychosis, I tried to imagine a time when the past, present, and future collided; a place where the weight of memory is heavier than reality.""

The Business of Beauty is a unique exploration of the history of beauty, consumption, and business in Victorian and Edwardian London. Illuminating national and cultural contingencies specific to London as a global metropolis, it makes an important intervention by challenging the view of those who-like their historical contemporaries-perceive the 19th and early 20th centuries as devoid of beauty praxis, let alone a commercial beauty culture. Contrary to this perception, The Business of Beauty reveals that Victorian and Edwardian women and men developed a number of tacit strategies to transform their looks including the purchase of new goods and services from a heterogeneous group of urban entrepreneurs: hairdressers, barbers, perfumers, wigmakers, complexion specialists, hair-restorers, manicurists, and beauty “culturists.” Mining trade journals, census data, periodical print, and advice literature, Jessica P. Clark takes us on a journey through Victorian and Edwardian London's beauty businesses, from the shady back parlors of Sarah “Madame Rachel” Leverson to the elegant showrooms of Eugène Rimmel into the first Mayfair salon of Mrs. Helena Titus, aka Helena Rubinstein. By revealing these stories, Jessica P. Clark revises traditional chronologies of British beauty consumption and provides the historical background to 20th-century developments led by Rubinstein and others. Weaving together histories of gender, fashion, and business to investigate the ways that Victorian critiques of self-fashioning and beautification defined both the buying and selling of beauty goods, this is a revealing resource for scholars, students, fashion followers, and beauty enthusiasts alike.

Discover the tools required to pursue your career in cosmetics marketing. Through an in-depth analysis of this fast-growing and complex industry, Cosmetics Marketing: Strategy and Innovation in the Beauty Industry provides thought-provoking, industry-led exercises and case studies to demonstrate the role of aesthetics, authentic communication, emerging technologies, cultural trends, and the measurement of marketing efforts. There are also practical, beautifully illustrated resources for entering the field, exercises for boosting creativity, preparations for interviews, as well as an overview of the beauty products and theory used by makeup artists and product developers. With a focus on the evolution of the industry and its social responsibilities in terms of inclusivity and sustainability, this is a core text for cosmetics courses in marketing and business at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Cosmetics Marketing is the ultimate guide to this powerful, multi-billion dollar global industry and will influence and support the next generation of leaders in beauty.

Imagining is a central power of the mind. When we visualize how something looks, or imagine how some combination of ingredients might taste, we picture absent things in a way that captures what it would be like to experience them. This book offers an original theory of the nature of this important mental phenomenon and its role is in our lives.