Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry (review)

In this well-researched and deftly organized study, Geoffrey Jones explicates the global beauty industry from its beginnings a century or more ago in the flower fields, kitchens, and laboratories of entrepreneurial women and men to its multibillion dollar industry status today. In some ways, the stories of small businesses innovating and thriving before falling by the wayside, being bought by bigger firms, or transforming into transnational corporations are comparable to those of other commodities. Yet the profoundly gendered and ethnic nature of beauty products—soaps, scents, toiletries, and cosmetics—differentiates them. Significant distinctions include the prominence of female business owners, such as Canadian-born Elizabeth Arden and African American Madame C. J. Walker, and the potential for immigrant and minority industry leadership, evidenced by Jewish beauty magnates Ernest Wertheimer, producer of Chanel No. 5, among other products, and Helena Rubenstein, who created her own eponymous line. Moreover, the intimate relationship of beauty products with the body and its daily care and the association of cleanliness and beauty (and ugliness and dirt) with particular types of bodies have had profound effects. Despite the movement toward market dominance by fewer numbers of firms, such as L'Oreal and Procter & Gamble, which currently claim over one-fifth of total world sales, local preferences for particular products, brands, and cosmetic effects and their distribution via a range of outlets, including female direct marketing microentrepreneurs, persist.

Jones examines three areas of inquiry: the modern beauty industry's pioneers, the construction of the beauty market, and the beauty industry's successful campaign for legitimacy. The latter refers to the illicit sexuality attributed to "painted women" before the twentieth century, skepticism about products' safety, efficacy, and advertised claims, and to recognition of the impact of the beauty business on national economies and multinational corporate wealth. In addition, Jones considers "two distinct spectrums." The "first has health and hygiene at one end and artifice at the other," and the second "extends from luxury or premium products to the mass market" (p. 8). The book chapters are organized into three sections; each takes us forward chronologically and further afield geographically while also assessing distinctive themes of the industry's history as it developed. Throughout, Jones draws on interviews with industry insiders, documents from company archives, and an impressive range of secondary literature to provide portraits of individual entrepreneurs and succinct, yet often lively histories of significant enterprises.

The dominance of well-established French perfumeries as desire for perfumes—and the ability to purchase them—dramatically increased in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, and America set the stage for developments in brand differentiation and market expansion. The stronger trademark protections in France than in other countries encouraged experimentation with synthetic fragrances, marketing methods, and product packaging. However, attempts at increasing sales via lower prices and mass markets did not always bring about hoped for returns, as many of the now primarily female consumers of perfumes rejected products when they lost their aura of exclusivity. Some firms did profit by branching out into additional product lines with names not associated with prestige goods and by controlling the pricing and placement of products. Frenchman Francois Coty, for example, built demand for his "accessible luxury" line by deploying associations of elegance with Paris and dispatching a professional male sales staff into the expanding number department stores. In the United States, Max Factor similarly exploited the glamour of Hollywood and its film stars to sell cosmetics and facilitate their transition from specialized theatrical use and questionable respectability to essential component of modern femininity.

Jones' analysis is most insightful when he contextualizes biographical vignettes within the history of capitalist development, consumer market expansion, and product diversification that resulted from Western imperialism. For example, Chapter 3, "Cleanliness and Civilization," links the increasing demand for toothpaste with the availability of processed foods that caused...