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This chapter details the growth of the beauty industry in the midst of two major world wars and the Great Depression. By 1945 the governments of the major Western democracies had deemed the production of beauty products a strategic necessity. The market continued to expand as previous income and leisure constraints on consumption relaxed, both as more young women entered the workforce, and as brands gave consumers inexpensive access to the world of Hollywood celebrities. An emergent international beauty consumer culture also became accessible to the middle classes throughout the West and to elites in cosmopolitan cities of Asia and Latin America.

This chapter describes the growth of the beauty industry during the postwar decades. Western and Japanese consumers celebrated the return of peace and prosperity by splurging on beauty products. As incomes rose, the industry enticed consumers with television advertising which employed in-depth research on consumer demographics and desires. Television drove the further democratization of the beauty market, which was particularly noticeable in the case of fragrance consumption. It also contributed to the further erosion of moral objections to the use of transformational products. In hair products especially, the combination of product innovation, marketing, and consumer education through salons served to expand the market rapidly. The segmentation of markets by income and distribution channels also made beauty products more accessible to wider ranges of consumers.

This chapter discusses the globalization and tribalization of the beauty industry in the twenty-first century. Over the last two decades, the spread of megabrands lent support to a view that globalization was continuing the homogenization of beauty ideals which had been under way since the nineteenth century. French and American brands remained the benchmark of aspiration. Yet globalization now also seemed to work in the opposite direction, serving to diffuse alternative and local beauty ideals. Companies now saw opportunities to take, say, Chinese and Indian beauty concepts to Western markets, and they had the marketing and logistical capabilities to execute such strategies. Changing demographics and societal values also led firms to pursue new markets, including ethnic minorities, pre-teens, and seniors.

This chapter discusses the beauty industry's search for a clear identity. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, numerous small and medium-sized cosmetics, fragrances, and toiletries brands were bought and sold, sometimes multiple times. It was clear that a large company from a different industry, whether pharmaceuticals, tobacco, or soap, could buy a good collection of cosmetics and fragrances brands. It was also clear that the real challenge was to manage them properly. This frenetic activity was more than a game of corporate musical chairs. More fundamentally, it was a story of a search for identity by an industry whose borders were still unclear. It was also a search for the right business model needed to take the industry, whatever its identity was, to the next stage.

The anxiety about body image is captured by the ubiquitous consumer culture and the ever-expanding beauty market in China today. Mass media contributes to the commodification of female appearance by producing the feeling of imperfection and creating the desire to buy an “ideal beauty”. While some women actively construct their senses of self by consuming various beauty products, including cosmetic surgery, others are passively exploited by the profit-driven market and suffer from dangerous operations such as leg-stretching surgery. Nevertheless, both cases display women’s bodies being targeted by China’s thriving beauty industry.

This chapter describes how the beauty industry became a target of the forces of social change in the 1970s. Critics from the left accused the industry of offering consumers choices that were constrained by bigoted assumptions about age, gender, ethnicity, and class. Promises of efficacy and safety were also held to be resting on little more than advertising copy. However, these criticisms did not derail the heavy advertising and expensive packaging of brands. Women remained the largest consumers of beauty products, and gender differences in consumption patterns remained strong.

This chapter provides a summary of the history of the beauty industry through the three lenses described in the Introduction: that of entrepreneurs, the construction of the market for beauty, and issue of legitimacy. It describes the emergence of entrepreneurs in the nineteenth century who sought to transform and commercialize the industry. It considers the role of the industry in constructing beauty and the choices it offered to consumers.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose: to recover the history of a business that we typically taken for granted but whose global growth tells us a lot about the modern world. Based on unprecedented access to the historical archives of companies, and interviews with leading figures in the industry today, it describes the people and the firms that have built the industry since the nineteenth century. It explores how they have contributed to what today we consider to be beautiful. The book approaches the history of the industry through three lenses. The first lens is that of the entrepreneurs who built the industry. The second lens concerns the construction of the market for beauty. The third lens focuses on the issue of legitimacy. Insofar as the beauty industry has shaped perceptions of what it means to be attractive, those perceptions play an important as well as controversial role in shaping broader constructions of gender, age, and ethnicity.

This chapter traces the growth of the modern beauty industry from its origins in the craft of making perfume. The craft itself has an ancient and global heritage. Roman emperors were said to have slept and bathed in a world of scent. Arab and Persian pharmacists and perfumers used new ‘essential oils‘ from the aromatic plants found on the Indian peninsula. This knowledge about perfumes was carried back to medieval Europe in the era of the Crusades, where monasteries manufactured and sold alcohol-based scented waters. During the course of the nineteenth century, perfume-making was reinvented into a capitalist industry. By the start of the twentieth century, one of the beauty industry's most creative figures, François Coty, had arrived at the scene. In 1905, Coty opened his own store in Paris where he displayed his perfume alongside scented powders, creams, and even stationery, becoming a pioneer of the idea of a branded line of scented products.

This chapter describes the globalization challenges faced by beauty companies. By the 1970s a number of brands, including Sunsilk, Pond's, Avon, and Max Factor, had become widely available. Toiletry companies and direct sellers built a market for mass-market toiletries, hair care, and cosmetics in many Latin American and other developing countries. However, the tensions between global ambitions and local markets remained, and consumer preferences were far from homogenous. Markets for most brands were more regional than global. With the exception of some luxury brands and toiletries, local firms dominated the markets of the United States, France, and Japan.

This chapter describes the transformation of soap manufacturers into the world's largest beauty companies in the nineteenth century. It details how people became aware of the importance of hygiene; the growing interest in using water for purposes of personal hygiene; the commercialization of toiletry products; entrepreneurs's efforts to market soap and other toiletries more explicitly as aids to beauty; and the development of export markets for skin creams and perfumery.

This chapter examines the larger issues subsumed by the beauty pageant industry in the Virgin Islands, focusing on its relationship with economics, entrepreneurship, and political emergence for the women of the Virgin Islands. It explains that when the Virgin Islands started negotiating with the U.S. for their autonomy, the federal government responded in racist colonial language. The U.S. was concerned about the Virgin Islands’ regard for women’s worth, moral predisposition, and their roles within and without the family, and about their beauty pageant events. Instead of being curtailed and limited by American colonial policies, the women of the Virgin Islands shifted their focus to intraisland relationships, continuing the Islands’ pageantry. The Virgin Islands developed popular pageants dependent on the accumulation of charitable donations, which determined the popular and the powerful among the Islands. The chapter notes that these fund-raising events influenced the perception of women, class, and power, in the Islands.