Catalog of an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 28, 2011-Jan. 29, 2012; Dallas Museum of Art, Mar. 4-May 27, 2012; Cleveland Museum of Art, July 1-Sept. 16, 2012.

A method for easing pain, countering the effects of aging, changing personality traits, and reviving sexual vigor combines the techniques of breathing in selected colors with spiritual and religious practices and ethics.

While it is frequently trivialized, the business of beauty is one of the most important global industries, generating millions of dollars and implicating many more the world over, from consumers to corporate elites. As trends spread so do ideas about standards of appearance and what is necessary to look good and fit in -- standards that are often influenced by ideas about race, class and gender norms. In looking at beauty products, practices, and ideas of youth in Guadalajara, Mexico, The Beauty Trade takes seriously the question of whether and how beauty norms are changing in relation to the globalizing beauty economy. Angela B. V. McCracken considers who benefits and who loses from beauty globalization and what this means for gender norms among youth. Weaving together fascinating ethnographic research on beauty practices and insights from political economy theory, the book presents a feminist analysis of the global economy of beauty. Rather than a sign of frivolity, the beauty economy is intimately connected to youth's social and economic development. Cosmetic makeovers have become a modern rite of passage for girls, enabling social connections and differentiations, as well as entrepreneurial activities. The global beauty economy is a phenomenon generated by young people, mostly women, laboring in, teaching, and consuming beauty --- and eager for belonging and originality, using every mechanism at their disposal to enhance their appearance. As McCracken shows, globalization is not homogenizing beauty standards to a Western ideal; rather, it is diversifying beauty standards. The Beauty Trade explains how globalization, combined with youth's desires for uniqueness, is enabling the spread of a diversity of beauty cultures, including alternative visions of gender appropriate looks and behavior.

We all want to look youthful for as long as possible. In this beautiful book, internationally renowned aromatherapy and skincare expert Daniele Ryman shares her practical secrets for delaying and reducing the signs of ageing and enhancing your looks the natural way, without the need to resort to treatments such as botox or cosmetic surgery. Secrets for Youth and Beauty explains how essential oils can be used to maximise your own natural beauty and radiance and to reduce the signs of ageing. It offers detailed information on Daniele's favourite plants and oils, including advice on their cosmetic and anti-ageing uses. She reveals her special remedies for how to target specific signs of ageing, for example wrinkles, age spots, stretch marks, thread veins, cellulite, brittle nails and lacklustre hair, and there is also advice on using aromatherapy to beat some of the key causes of the signs of ageing, including stress, insomnia and PMT. Daniele provides a wealth of easy-to-make natural recipes for use on the face and body. She also gives advice on how essential oils can enhance your work, home and travel environment and provide a youth-enhancing alternative to the toxic chemicals that surround us every day.

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth "In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." —Kirkus Reviews Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.

Presents a comprehensive guide for parents, teachers, and youth workers to help them understand and address the issues that influence the behaviors, values, and attitudes of young people in their care.

“[Beauty Sick] will blow the top off the body image movement…provocative and necessary.” — Rebellious Magazine An award-winning psychology professor reveals how the cultural obsession with women's appearance is an epidemic that harms women's ability to get ahead and to live happy, meaningful lives, in this powerful, eye-opening work in the vein of Peggy Orenstein and Sheryl Sandberg. Today’s young women face a bewildering set of contradictions when it comes to beauty. They don’t want to be Barbie dolls but, like generations of women before them, are told they must look like them. They’re angry about the media’s treatment of women but hungrily consume the outlets that belittle them. They mock modern culture’s absurd beauty ideal and make videos exposing Photoshopping tricks, but feel pressured to emulate the same images they criticize by posing with a "skinny arm." They understand that what they see isn’t real but still download apps to airbrush their selfies. Yet these same young women are fierce fighters for the issues they care about. They are ready to fight back against their beauty-sick culture and create a different world for themselves, but they need a way forward. In Beauty Sick, Dr. Renee Engeln, whose TEDx talk on beauty sickness has received more than 250,000 views, reveals the shocking consequences of our obsession with girls’ appearance on their emotional and physical health and their wallets and ambitions, including depression, eating disorders, disruptions in cognitive processing, and lost money and time. Combining scientific studies with the voices of real women of all ages, she makes clear that to truly fulfill their potential, we must break free from cultural forces that feed destructive desires, attitudes, and words—from fat-shaming to denigrating commentary about other women. She provides inspiration and workable solutions to help girls and women overcome negative attitudes and embrace their whole selves, to transform their lives, claim the futures they deserve, and, ultimately, change their world.

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.

Literary Nonfiction. Elisa Gabbert's THE SELF UNSTABLE combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan to provoke the reader's reflection unsettling the role of truth and interrogating the "I" in both literary and daily life: "The future isn't anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear." "Gabbert strikes a perfect balance between heart and head, between cleverness and earnestness, between language that demonstrates its own fallibility and language that is surprisingly, perfectly precise." Make Magazine ..". smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn't so much distort as endlessly reveal, ' like the panopticon eye of a camera." The Rumpus ..". the dispassion about the self allows the writer to enact a number of equally lovely sleights of hand . . . Even while the author is drawn to image and reason, she is also in love with the vanishing point, where all perspective is ecstatically compressed into a single node." Gently Read Literature"