Ugly Beauty
The Ugly Face of the Beauty Business
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From acclaimed novelist and cultural historian Ruth Brandon comes a captivating dual biography of the legendary founders of the cosmetics industry, Helena Rubinstein and Eugène Schueller, creator of L’Oréal. Brandon’s gripping and sometimes disturbing story of gender, power, and politics stretches back from the darkest days of World War II, to the emergence of the modern fashion and makeup industries, with magazines such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan and game-changing product lines such as Avon and Mary Kay. Ugly Beauty resonates as well with its implications for modern culture, as we enter an era when haute couture and cosmetology exert an ever more powerful influence upon society at large.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With wonderful attention to detail and real affection for her subjects, Brandon tells the story of Helena Rubinstein (1870 1965), a Polish Jew from a poor family with a small salon in Australia, who became the first woman tycoon and self-made millionaire. Her timing was excellent: she struck at the moment when decent women, for the first time, were allowing themselves makeup and were willing to shop for it publicly. At the same time, a young French chemist named Eug ne Schueller (1881 1957) was making his name in hair dyes (and later collaborating with the Nazis); it was his company, L'Oreal, that swallowed Rubinstein's business. The descriptions of Schueller's political scandals are fascinating, but the story shines when Brandon returns to Rubinstein, a stubborn, spirited woman who responded to a luxury Park Avenue apartment's "No Jews" policy by buying the entire building, and who calmly thwarted robbers in her home at the age of 91. A clearheaded discussion of current beauty standards, vanity, and the gender politics of the modern cosmetic industry rounds out this lively history of the founding of the beauty business as we know it.
