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, Estee Lauder,
L'Oreal, 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.
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