Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada's Black Beauty Culture by Cheryl Thompson (review)

Supermodel Naomi Campbell recently disclosed her disappointment at her June 1988 Italian Vogue cover. Vogue covers are major achievements in modelling and this was just Campbell's second. The disappointment stemmed from the fact that the makeup artist for the shoot arrived with only pale shades of foundation. From that point on, Campbell brought her own foundation and powder to shoots (Campbell, The Guardian, 19 March 2016). That such a thing would happen in the late 1980s is quite telling of the problems within the beauty industry. Yet, they were by no means new then and continue today. As Communications scholar Cheryl Thompson's new book Beauty in a Box reveals, the history of Black women creating, selling, and consuming products designed for them specifically is long, yet the barriers have been substantial and persistent. The reference to detangling in the title reveals the work to be very much a history of the present, and Thompson's book is a timely intervention into pressing current conversations

Beauty in a Box makes a critical contribution to the history of beauty in Canada. One of the first studies to focus exclusively on Black women's beauty in twentieth-century Canada, it is a wide-ranging, ambitious recuperative work that adds significantly to our knowledge of a Black beauty culture deeply rooted in Canada. Thompson places the Canadian context into direct dialogue with the much more developed American literature and teases out important connections to Caribbean diasporic communities. Using Black newspapers as primary evidence, Thompson traces the rise of some Black cosmetics and hair services largely in the second half of the twentieth century and directed toward presumed female consumers.

Of the book's five chapters, the first addresses the period from 1914 to 1945 and the others follow chronologically, with the last chapter on the early 2000s. In chapter one, Thompson includes advertisements from Dawn, an African-Canadian newspaper, as part of the wider context of new black identities emerging in the early twentieth century. She argues, for example, that Dawn's advertisements "promoted images of New Negro Canadian Women" (56). Chapter two studies the influence of the arrival of Ebony magazine in Canada in 1946 and weaves in important material about beautician Viola Desmond as well as the rise of "Black is Beautiful." Chapter three traces some of the white- and Black-owned cosmetics businesses selling makeup and hair products to Black Canadian consumers in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter four traces the overarching rise of a global beauty industry dominated by a number of large corporations that scooped up small businesses. Thompson adds the story of African-American owned companies, who sold goods in Canada, to the history of these acquisitions. In this chapter, Thompson notes how a focus on Black beauty, burgeoning in the 1960s and 1970s, shifted to "ethnic," both a reflection of the growth of the market but also a troubling deflection. The fifth and final chapter engages with current debates on the politics and representations of Black women's hair.

Thompson's work is inspiring and it should, as she calls for in the conclusion, produce more work on Black Canadian beauty culture. In the flow of goods, images, and ideas across borders, beauty culture is truly transnational. This is not to say that there are no differences and Thompson notes times when Canada may have led the way. In chapter 3, for example, she argues Toronto's Black newspapers promoted ideas of a particular Black beauty culture before larger American periodicals such as Essence and Ebony appeared for sale in Canada. Overall Thompson's book reveals the rich possibilities of studying the intersection of race and beauty. While Beauty in a Box is largely focused on women and leaves aside the history of barber shops, for example, Thompson acknowledges and discusses these absences and notes why certain histories...