How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a "kitchen physic," as homemade cosmetics were once called, become a ...multibillion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman's business? InHope in a Jar, historian Kathy Peiss gives us the first full-scale social history of America's beauty culture, from the buttermilk and rice powder recommended by Victorian recipe books to the mass-produced products of our contemporary consumer age. She shows how women, far from being pawns and victims, used makeup to declare their freedom, identity, and sexual allure as they flocked to enter public life. And she highlights the leading role of white and black women-Helena Rubenstein and Annie Turnbo Malone, Elizabeth Arden and Madame C. J. Walker-in shaping a unique industry that relied less on advertising than on women's customs of visiting and conversation. Replete with the voices and experiences of ordinary women,Hope in a Jaris a richly textured account of the ways women created the cosmetics industry and cosmetics created the modern woman.
The managed hand Kang, Miliann
2010., 20100502, 2010, 2010-06-02
eBook
Two women, virtual strangers, sit hand-in-hand across a narrow table, both intent on the same thing-achieving the perfect manicure. Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United ...States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.
This engaging introduction to Japan's burgeoning beauty culture investigates a wide range of phenomenon—aesthetic salons, dieting products, male beauty activities, and beauty language—to find out why ...Japanese women and men are paying so much attention to their bodies. Laura Miller uses social science and popular culture sources to connect breast enhancements, eyelid surgery, body hair removal, nipple bleaching, and other beauty work to larger issues of gender ideology, the culturally-constructed nature of beauty ideals, and the globalization of beauty technologies and standards. Her sophisticated treatment of this timely topic suggests that new body aesthetics are not forms of "deracializiation" but rather innovative experimentation with identity management. While recognizing that these beauty activities are potentially a form of resistance, Miller also considers the commodification of beauty, exploring how new ideals and technologies are tying consumers even more firmly to an ever-expanding beauty industry. By considering beauty in a Japanese context, Miller challenges widespread assumptions about the universality and naturalness of beauty standards.
The Beauty Industry Black, Paula
2004, 20040802, 2004-08-02, 2004-05-28, 20040101
eBook
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.
This essay analyzes recent discourse on two emerging representations of women in China, "tender" women (nennu) and "ripe" women (shunu), in order to examine the relationships among gender, body ...politics, and consumerism. The discourse of nennu and shunu suggests that older, ripe women become younger and more tender by consuming fashions, cosmetic surgery technologies, and beauty and health care products and services because tender women represent the ideal active consumership that celebrates beauty, sexuality, and individuality. This discourse serves to enhance consumers' desire for beauty and health and to ensure the continued growth of China's beauty economy and consumer capitalism. Highlighting the role of the female body, feminine beauty, and feminine youth in developing consumerism, this discourse downplays the contributions of millions of beauty and health care providers (predominantly laid-off female workers and rural migrant women) and new forms of gender exploitation. Such an overemphasis on gender masks intensified class division. This essay suggests that women and their bodies become new terrains from which post-Mao China can draw its power and enact consumerism. Gender constitutes both an economic multiplier to boost China's consumer capitalism and a biopolitical strategy to regulate and remold women and their bodies into subjects that are identified with the state's political and economic objectives. Since consumerism has been incorporated into China's nation-building project, gender thus becomes a vital resource for both consumer capitalist development and nation building. This essay shows that both gender and the body are useful analytic categories for the study of postsocialism.
Building on a social identity framework, our cross-level process model explains how a manager's servant leadership affects frontline employees' service performance, measured as service quality, ...customer-focused citizenship behavior, and customer-oriented prosocial behavior. Among a sample of 238 hairstylists in 30 salons and 470 of their customers, we found that hair stylists' self-identity embedded in the group, namely, self-efficacy and group identification, partially mediated the positive effect of salon managers' servant leadership on stylists' service performance as rated by the customers, after taking into account the positive influence of transformational leadership. Moreover, group competition climate strengthened the positive relationship between self-efficacy and service performance.
BACKGROUND:
A recent meta‐analysis found that indoor tanning use before the age of 35 years increases the risk of melanoma, supporting policies to restrict indoor tanning use among adolescents. The ...objectives of the current study were to provide a national assessment of prevalence and trends of indoor tanning use among US adolescents, to examine changes in the prevalence of indoor tanning use from 1998 to 2004 in relation to state policies on minors' access, and to assess the prevalence of burns, rashes, and infections among users.
METHODS:
Two cross‐sectional population‐based surveys of US youths ages 11 to 18 years and their parents/guardians conducted in 1998 (N = 1196) and 2004 (N = 1613) used identical questions to assess use of indoor tanning and correlates of this behavior.
RESULTS:
The prevalence of indoor tanning use by adolescents within the past year changed little from 1998 to 2004 (10% to 11%). In states with policies regarding minors' access to indoor tanning, the prevalence stayed the same or decreased from 1998 to 2004, whereas it increased in states without such policies. Neither trend was found to be statistically significant. Youth tanning attitudes, parental indoor tanning use, and parents' permission were strongly associated with youth use of indoor tanning. Fifty‐eight percent of users reported burns from indoor tanning.
CONCLUSIONS:
The presence of state legislation restricting minors' access to indoor tanning appears to have limited effectiveness, perhaps because most states' policies permit use with parental consent. Multipronged approaches are needed to reduce indoor tanning use in youths. Cancer 2009. Published 2008 by the American Cancer Society.
The prevalence of indoor tanning use in youths did not markedly change between 1998 and 2004, despite increasing numbers of states with legislation restricting youth access to indoor tanning. This suggests the need to develop multipronged approaches that could enhance changes in this behavior among underage minors.
How transnational modernity is taking shape in and in
relation to Asia Fashion and Beauty in the Time of
Asia considers the role of bodily aesthetics in the shaping of
Asian modernities and the ...formation of the so-called "Asian
Century." S. Heijin Lee, Christina H. Moon, and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
train our eyes on sites as far-flung, varied, and intimate as
Guangzhou and Los Angeles, Saigon and Seoul, New York and Toronto.
They map the transregional connections, ever-evolving aspirations
and sensibilities, and new worlds and life paths forged through
engagements with fashion and beauty. Contributors consider American
influence on plastic surgery in Korea, Vietnamese debates about
"the fashionable," and the costs and commitments demanded of those
who make and wear fast fashion, from Chinese garment workers to
Nepalese nail technicians in New York who are mandated to dress
"fashionably." In doing so, this interdisciplinary anthology moves
beyond common characterizations of Asians and the Asian diaspora as
simply abject laborers or frenzied consumers, analyzing who the
modern Asian subject is now: what they wear and how they work,
move, eat, and shop.