Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kathy Peiss has written a history of American women's use of beauty products from the Victorian period into the present, although its strength and interest lie in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book's central, undertheorized argument is that women were not oppressed by the beauty industry, especially cosmetics, but enthusiastically participated in and created it. American women have not simply been deluded consumers of goods that undermine their self-esteem. Rather, they have reveled in beauty products, using them to navigate modern life and to create public statements about themselves as women. Although Peiss does not dispute the power of capitalism—corporations, advertising, and mass media—to create and profit from women's desire and fantasy, she argues that beauty culture is more complicated. Social relationships, rituals, and female institutions are critical in assessing the meaning of women's embrace of a culture devoted to their physical makeover.

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She begins by examining women's efforts in the 1860s to improve their faces through beauty preparations whose secrets were passed between them or through the purchase of patent cosmetics and pharmacists' preparations. During the nineteenth century, the controversial use of "paint" or makeup to create an image or an identity began, an idea that Peiss identifies as fundamental and far-reaching in comprehending the power of cosmetics in everyday life (p. 49). Photographic and stage makeup introduced external and standardized models of beauty that challenged the natural ideal and began to find their way into ordinary life. Women's growing interest in beauty products was linked to their new sense of themselves as consumers. The theme of women using makeup to create a new public identity wends its way through the decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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