Beauty Imagined

The global beauty business permeates our lives, influencing how we perceive ourselves and what it is to be beautiful. The brands and firms that have dominated this industry, such as L'Oreal, Unilever, Rimmel, and Chanel, have re-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 industry has shaped perceptions of beauty worldwide as beauty ideals were imagined by successive generations of entrepreneurs. These men and women built brands which interpreted prevailing societal norms, as well as the business organizations needed to sell them. They democratized access to beauty products, once the privilege of elites, but they also imagined the gender and ethnic borders of beauty, and its association with a handful of cities, notably Paris and later New York. The result was an extraordinary homogenization of beauty ideals throughout the world. However over the last two decades globalization has worked in a more complex fashion, both encouraging further homogenization as global beauty brands entered China, Russia and India, but also encouraging heterogeneity through hyper-segmentation strategies and providing consumers with far greater choices. In the early twenty first century, beauty is in the process of being re-imagined again, with profound consequences for today's managers and consumers.