Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Paris, Cairo (review)

Susan Ossman's book, Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Paris, Cairo, is a poetic meditation on the local institutions that produce and reproduce trans-national notions of beauty. In particular, the author focuses on the institution of the beauty salon, drawing from fieldwork in various neighborhoods in Casablanca, Paris and Cairo. Ossman attempts to shed light on the flow of shared notions of beauty in the context of such variables as class and women's differing roles in society. The author poses the driving questions of the study as follows:

Do Casablancans simply absorb models from Cairo or Paris into themselves and in doing so indicate the social group to which they belong? Or is there a more complex process of seeing, choosing, and judging going on? Are all models, like all salons, indeed "open" to all?

(55)

Three Faces of Beauty approaches these questions obliquely, offering a nuanced series of reflections on the nature of mimesis and on the factors contributing to the complex dynamics at play between the locales and across class and social groups. In the process, Ossman situates her analyses of beauty salons in the context of other media that disseminate notions of hygiene and beauty, namely cinema and local women's magazines.

In its approach to the final question above, the book also traces the origins of the beauty salon and its relationship to other salon cultures that influenced its development, suggesting that: "they all thrive on exchanges between people in ways that distinguish them from the 'public' arena. Yet they bring together people who need have no special ties beyond the space of interaction they define" (64). Drawing upon the similarity of this social function, identified as well by Don Herzog in his analysis of the barbershop, Ossman posits that the beauty salon "which after all, bears the name of an institution Habermas saw as central to France's 'peculiar' move toward democracy and civility" could "act as such a forum" (74). In other words, Ossman sees the salon as a leveling agent, offering women a critical point of entry into the public sphere.

Ossman reports that her idea to study beauty salons was received initially with some skepticism, particularly in Casablanca. Male colleagues and informants insisted that the hammam, the traditional bath house, not the salon, would be a more suitable and more authentic site in which an anthropologist could conduct a study of the production of female beauty. She meditates at length on the underlying assumptions of such statements, reflected also in the memoirs of men who had accompanied their mothers to the hammam as children.

In contrast to the heavy, overdetermined "background bodies" of tradition, Ossman argues that en-lightened beauty, as offered by the artisans of the salon, is a construct of urban modernity, and in particular, a function of circulation. Ossman approaches beauty as pedestrian in both its senses: ordinary and connected to walking. According to Ossman, in a nod to Walter Benjamin and Marcel Mauss, notions of beauty are forged and absorbed by walking subjects along the boulevards of Paris and the North African "New Cities" (70).

Mimicking the urban footsteps of female beauties, the book is structured, in Ossman's words, as "a record of a peregrination" (154), and she describes the book's chapters as "movements" (95). This fluid structure represents both the book's major strength and its major weakness. Unlike the majority of the book's meanderings, chapter four, entitled, "Styling Distinctions," reflects a more traditional form of classificatory scholarship, delineating three types of salons that cut across the research sites: proximate salons; made-to-order or quick salons; and specialty or designer salons. The distinctions are instructive, and demonstrate a uniformity of salon routines across the research sites. However, the reader nevertheless senses that this chapter lacks the evocative nature of the other, less linearly constructed arguments. At the same time, the theoretically rich chapters tantalizingly suggest fruitful analytic...