In the early twentieth century China’s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew upon a centuries-old tradition of books featuring illustrations of women who embodied virtue, desirability, and Chinese cultural values, and changes in it reveal the foundational value shifts that would bring forth a democratic citizenry in the post-imperial era. The illustrations presented ordinary readers with tantalizing visions of the modern lifestyles that were imagined to accompany Republican China’s new civic consciousness. Citizens of Beauty is the first book to explore the One Hundred Illustrated Beauties in order to compare social ideals during China’s shift from imperial to Republican times. The book contextualizes the social and political significance of the aestheticized female body in a rapidly changing genre, showing how progressive commercial artists used images of women to promote a vision of Chinese modernity that was democratic, mobile, autonomous, and free from the crippling hierarchies and cultural norms of old China.

Lead in lipstick? 1,4 dioxane in baby soap? Coal tar in shampoo? How is this possible? Simple. The $35 billion cosmetics industry is so powerful that they've kept themselves unregulated for decades. Not one cosmetic product has to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration before hitting the market. Incredible? Consider this: The European Union has banned more than 1,100 chemicals from cosmetics. The United States has banned just 10. Only 11% of chemicals used in cosmetics in the US have been assessed for health and safety - leaving a staggering 89% with unknown or undisclosed effects. More than 70% of all personal care products may contain phthalates, which are linked to birth defects and infertility. Many baby soaps are contaminated with the cancer-causing chemical 1,4 dioxane. It's not just women who are affected by this chemists' brew. Shampoo, deodorant, face lotion and other products used daily by men, women and children contain hazardous chemicals that the industry claims are "within acceptable limits." But there's nothing acceptable about daily multiple exposures to carcinogenic chemicals -- from products that are supposed to make us feel healthy and beautiful. Not Just a Pretty Face delves deeply into the dark side of the beauty industry, and looks to hopeful solutions for a healthier future. This scathing investigation peels away less-than-lovely layers to expose an industry in dire need of an extreme makeover. 15 percent of the purchase price of each book sold benefits the national Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, administered by the Breast Cancer Fund, through December 31, 2012.

Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India follows a postcolonial city as it transforms into a bustling global metropolis after the liberalization of the Indian economy. Taking the once idyllic “garden city” of Bangalore in southern India as its point of departure, the book explores how artists across India and beyond foreground neoliberalism as a “structure of feeling” permeating aesthetics, selfhood, and everyday life. Jisha Menon conveys the affective life of the city through multiple aesthetic projects that express a range of urban feelings, including aspiration, panic, and obsolescence. As developers and policymakers remodel the city through tumultuous construction projects, urban beautification, privatization, and other templated features of “world‐class cities,” urban citizens are also changing—transformed by nostalgia, narcissism, shame, and the spaces where they dwell and work. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, Menon delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism, uncovering the interconnectedness of local and global power structures as well as art’s capacity to absorb and critique liberalization’s discontents. She argues that neoliberalism isn’t just an economic, social, and political phenomenon; neoliberalism is also a profoundly aesthetic project.

Looks at how family, religion, history, news and entertainment keep women thinking they are defenseless. Snortland contends that women are capable of defending themselves and their loved ones--if they learn how. She argues that is not the female's size, it is her culturally induced ignorance that makes her think she is helpless. Snortland offers a clarion call to all women to wake up and take charge of their own self-defense--both verbal and physical--and celebrates women (and kids) who fought back. --Adapted from publisher description.

All societies around the world and through time value beauty highly. Tracing the evolutions of the Colombian standards of beauty since 1845, Michael Edward Stanfield explores their significance to and symbiotic relationship with violence and inequality in the country. Arguing that beauty holds not only social power but also economic and political power, he positions it as a pacific and inclusive influence in a country “ripped apart by violence, private armies, seizures of land, and abuse of governmental authority, one hoping that female beauty could save it from the ravages of the male beast.” One specific means of obscuring those harsh realities is the beauty pageant, of which Colombia has over 300 per year. Stanfield investigates the ways in which these pageants reveal the effects of European modernity and notions of ethnicity on Colombian women, and how beauty for Colombians has become an external representation of order and morality that can counter the pathological effects of violence, inequality, and exclusion in their country.

Should western beauty practices, ranging from lipstick to labiaplasty, be included within the United Nations understandings of harmful traditional/cultural practices? By examining the role of common beauty practices in damaging the health of women, creating sexual difference, and enforcing female deference, this book argues that they should. In the 1970s feminists criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but some ‘new’ feminists argue that beauty practices are no longer oppressive now that women can ‘choose’ them. However, in the last two decades the brutality of western beauty practices seems to have become much more severe, requiring the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as persistent, but in many ways more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing and surgical alteration of the labia. It looks at the cosmetic surgery and body piercing/cutting industries as being forms of self-mutilation by proxy, in which the surgeons and piercers serve as proxies to harm women’s bodies, and concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created. This essential work will appeal to students and teachers of feminist psychology, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist sociology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women’s health.

An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund’s collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.

The secrets behind the world's most beautiful skin! In Korea, healthy, glowing skin is the ideal form of beauty. It's considered achievable by all, men and women, young and old—and it begins with adopting a skin-first mentality. Now, this Korean beauty philosophy has taken the world by storm! As the founder of Soko Glam, a leading Korean beauty and lifestyle website, esthetician and beauty expert Charlotte Cho guides you through the world-renowned Korean ten-step skin-care routine—and far beyond—to help you achieve the clearest and most radiant skin of your life With Charlotte's step-by-step tutorials, skin-care tips, and advice on what to look for in products at all price levels, you'll learn how to pamper and care for your skin at home with Korean-approved techniques and pull off the "no makeup" makeup look we've seen and admired on women in the streets of Seoul. And you'll get access to beauty secrets from Charlotte's favorite beauty gurus from around the world, including supermodels, YouTube sensations, top makeup artists, magazine editors, actresses, and leading Korean skincare researchers. With the knowledge of an expert and voice of a trusted friend, Charlotte's personal tour through Korean beauty culture will help you find joy in the everyday beauty routines that will transform your skin.

What if Beauty became the Beast? Discover a new angle on the classic fairytale in this fantasy retelling that's perfect for anyone who can't get enough of Beauty and the Beast. In the city of Yuan, the blind Princess Isra is raised to be a human sacrifice. Her death will ensure her city’s vitality. In the desert, a mutant beast named Gem fights to save his people, known as the Monstrous, from starvation. Neither dreams that, together, they can return balance to their worlds. When Gem is captured for trying to steal Yuan’s enchanted roses, he becomes a prisoner of the city. Isra enlists his help, and soon begins to care for him—and to question everything she has been brought up to believe. . . . “Engrossing tale . . . [an] intense love story.” —Kirkus Reviews “The bones of the classic Beauty and the Beast story are all here, imaginatively fleshed out with tropes from science fiction, fantasy, and even political drama.” —The Bulletin, Recommended “Jay’s characters are well-realized . . . [the] setup is intriguing and her writing assured.” —Publishers Weekly “Revelations and plot twists keep the action flowing and romance growing. . . . A satisfying read for fans of romantic fantasy.” —School Library Journal

“Scathing, upsetting and generous all at once, this novel, about millennial friends in pre-2008-crash San Francisco, thrums with Tulathimutte’s sly intelligence and unerring comic timing. . . . The warm flashes make the satire cut deeper.” —The New York Times, “The Funniest Novels Since Catch-22” "One of the really phenomenal novels I've read in the last decade." —Jonathan Franzen From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut—This Side of Paradise for a new era. Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again. A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.