The Beauty Industry

The beauty industry is now a multinational, multi-million dollar business. In recent years its place in contemporary culture has altered hugely as salons have become not simply places to have your hair cut or your nails done, but increasingly sites of physical and even spiritual therapy. In this fascinating and nuanced study, Paula Black strips away many popular assumptions about the beauty industry, including the one that says it exploits people's insecurity by projecting an illusory beauty myth. The interviews in this book - both with the beauty industry's workers and its clients - reveal a far more complex and interesting picture, and, in their presentation, Black re-formulates many feminist debates around choice and constraint. The debates addressed include issues around the body; the construction and maintenance of gender identity; changing definitions of health and well-being; and labour processes.

Made Up exposes the multibillion-dollar beauty industry that promotes unrealistic beauty standards through a market basket of advertising tricks, techniques, and technologies. Cosmetics magnate Charles Revson, a founder of Revlon, was quoted as saying, "In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope." This pioneering entrepreneur, who built an empire on the foundation of nail polish, captured the unvarnished truth about the beauty business in a single metaphor: hope in a jar. Made Up: How the Beauty Industry Manipulates Consumers, Preys on Women’s Insecurities, and Promotes Unattainable Beauty Standards is a thorough examination of innovative, and often controversial, advertising practices used by beauty companies to persuade consumers, mainly women, to buy discretionary goods like cosmetics and scents. These approaches are clearly working: the average American woman will spend around $300,000 on facial products alone during her lifetime. This revealing book traces the evolution of the global beauty industry, discovers what makes beauty consumers tick, explores the persistence and pervasiveness of the feminine beauty ideal, and investigates the myth-making power of beauty advertising. It also examines stereotypical portrayals of women in beauty ads, looks at celebrity beauty endorsements, and dissects the “looks industry.” Made Upuncovers the reality behind an Elysian world of fantasy and romance created by beauty brands that won’t tell women the truth about beauty.

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.

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.

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.

Sustainability has come to the fore in the cosmetics andpersonal care industry. Rising ethical consumerism and the need forresource efficiency are making cosmetic companies – small,independent firms to global giants – take steps towardssustainable development. Sustainability: How the Cosmetics Industry is Greening Updiscusses the growing importance of sustainability in the cosmeticsindustry, highlighting the various ways organisations can addressthe economic, environmental and social aspects. How can thecosmetics industry make a difference in terms of ingredients,formulations, packaging, CSR, operations, and green marketing? Topics covered include: Environmental and social impacts of cosmetic products Ethical sourcing and biodiversity Renewable energy and waste management Green formulations and ingredients Green marketing issues and consumer behaviour Green standards, certification schemes and indices in thecosmetics industry Industry experts share their experiences on how they aretackling the challenges of sustainability: from raw materialprocurements, manufacturing, business processes, to distributionand marketing to consumers. The book concludes with somefuture growth projections; what are some of the shortcomings insustainability in the cosmetics industry and what can we expect tosee in the future? Sustainability: How the Cosmetics Industry is Greening Updiscusses business and technical issues in all areas of sustainableproduct development, from sourcing ingredients, to formulation,manufacture and packaging. Covering a diverse range of subjects, this book appeals toprofessionals in many key sectors of the cosmetics and personalcare industry; cosmetic chemists, formulation scientists, R&Ddirectors, policy makers, business and marketing executives. It is also of relevance to academic researchers working in cosmeticchemistry and sustainable process development.

This volume examines regulatory issues of ingredients, manufacturing, and finished products, as well as claim substantiation, packaging, and advertising. A chapter on Chinese regulations will be one of the first about this country to be published in book form. • Includes a regulatory map of India and China • Global IP protection strategies • REACH and European Regulatory standards • "Green chemistry" in relation to cosmetics and regulation * Simplifies global regulations for anyone exporting cosmetics. * Excellent reference not only for manufacturing and marketing, but for legal departments and packaging as well. * Describes how to develop a global regulatory strategy.

One of the first transnational, feminist studies of Canada’s black beauty culture and the role that media, retail, and consumers have played in its development, Beauty in a Box widens our understanding of the politics of black hair. The book analyzes advertisements and articles from media—newspapers, advertisements, television, and other sources—that focus on black communities in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary. The author explains the role local black community media has played in the promotion of African American–owned beauty products; how the segmentation of beauty culture (i.e., the sale of black beauty products on store shelves labelled “ethnic hair care”) occurred in Canada; and how black beauty culture, which was generally seen as a small niche market before the 1970s, entered Canada’s mainstream by way of department stores, drugstores, and big-box retailers. Beauty in a Box uses an interdisciplinary framework, engaging with African American history, critical race and cultural theory, consumer culture theory, media studies, diasporic art history, black feminism, visual culture, film studies, and political economy to explore the history of black beauty culture in both Canada and the United States.