This volume aims to advance our understanding of beauty's role in modern consumer societies by bringing together fresh scholarship that addresses a common set of questions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including especially history, but also black studies, women's studies, German studies, sociology, and anthropology.

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.

The Global Beauty Industry is an interdisciplinary text that uses beauty to explore topics of gender, race, class, colorism, nation, bodies, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and intersectionality. Integrating materials from a wide range of cultural and geo-political contexts, it coalesces with initiatives to produce more internationally relevant curricula in fields such as sociology, as well as cultural, women's/gender, media, and globalization studies.

Through micro-analysis of language use, this book chronicles young women's pathways to becoming a Tanzanian beauty queen, offering an original perspective on the intersection of language with globalization, nationalism, and inequality in urban East Africa. This compelling linguistic ethnography considers the real-life effects, both on- and off-stage, of language policy, education, and gender dynamics for the women competing in the pageants. While highlighting many contestants' struggles for escape from poverty and patriarchy, the book also emphasizes their creative strategies – linguistic and otherwise – for bettering their lives and shows how people living in a global economic periphery take part in, and sometimes feel left out of, the wider world.

"Do not be misled by the title of this book. It is a study of Taiwan's bridal industry but it is also a fine ethnography of marriage in contemporary urban Taipei. With great subtlety, Bonnie Adrian shows us how much marriage in Taiwan has changed and how many of the old ways it has retained. She does so with wit and humor."—Margery Wolf, author of A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility "Faced with the puzzle of the ubiquitous bridal photography in Taipei, Bonnie Adrian has produced a model ethnography of media-saturated contemporary life. Ethnographically adventurous, analytically smart, and warmly human, this book cleverly unpacks the ways women’s canny choices in Taiwan are forged at the intersection of everyday worlds of inter-generational tension, fantasies fed by a keenly competitive local culture industry, and global imagery tied to the transnational beauty industry. Unlike many who work on globalization, Adrian has not lost sight of the ways that gender and family are still at the heart of people’s social worlds and women are not victims."—Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Veiled Sentiments and Writing Women’s Worlds

Publisher description

Globalizing Ideal Beauty is the forgotten history of a group of women copywriters whose successful ad campaigns went international in the 1920s and spread an American notion of feminine appeal from Bangor to Bangkok. Sutton's approach is grounded in a huge body of original archival research that has so far remained largely untapped.