Print Price: $39.95

Format:
Paperback
432 pp.
32 colour plates; 20 black and white images, 156 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199639625

Publication date:
October 2011

Imprint: OUP UK

Beauty Imagined

A History of the Global Beauty Industry

Geoffrey Jones

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.

Readership : Academics, students and general readers interested in beauty and the beauty industry from Business History, History, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Economic History.

Reviews

• "A must read for the beauty junkie."
  
  --Julia DiNardo, fashionpulsedaily.com
  "Geoffrey Jones has distilled a massive amount of evidence from around the world to produce the intriguing essence of the global beauty business. This book's incisive analysis of how the industry grew, and its current challenges and dynamics, makes it essential reading for people working in beauty today, as well as millions who delight in using our brands each day."
  
  --Bernd Beetz, Chief Executive, Coty
  
• [.rt error 1]
• "Geoffrey Jones has written a formidable history of the Beauty Industry that reads like a novel. Beauty Imagined, A History of the Global Beauty Industry... is poised to become a classic of the genre. It should be read by anyone involved in the beauty business."
  
  --Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, EH.NET
  "Although the book is not written as a how-to guide, there are plenty of lessons for entrepreneurs and industry executives"
  
  --Women's Wear Daily
  "Nothing slips away in Jones' book...it's an enormous assembly of inter-linked stories...all the great cosmetic monsters rampage through the book."
  
  --Veronica Horwell, The Guardian