This volume aims to advance our understanding of beauty's role in modern consumer societies by bringing together fresh scholarship that addresses a common set of questions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including especially history, but also black studies, women's studies, German studies, sociology, and anthropology.

Introduction: 'It Makes Princes of Those Who Have It': Beauty and Consumerism in the Twentieth Century; Hartmut Berghoff and Thomas Kühne PART I: BASIC DEVELOPMENTS AND KEY PROBLEMS 1. The Global and the Local in the Beauty Industry: A Historical Perspective; Geoffrey Jones 2. Consuming Bodies: The Commodification and Technification of Slenderness in the Twentieth Century; Ulrike Thoms 3. Medial Beauty: Three Sociological Theses on Late Modern Body Aesthetics; Michael R. Müller and Anne Sonnenmoser 4. The Harm in Beauty: Toni Morrison's Revisions of Racialized Traditional Theories of Aesthetics in The Bluest Eye; Althea Tait 5. Queer Beauty: Image and Acceptance in the Expanded Public Sphere; Jennifer V. Evans PART II: COSMOPOLITAN ATTEMPTS IN INTERWAR EUROPE 6. Miss Germany, Miss Europe, Miss Universe: Beauty Pageants in the Popular Media of the Weimar Republic; Mila Ganeva 7. Recognition for the 'Beautiful Jewess': Beauty Queens Crowned by Modern Jewish Print Media; Kerry Wallach 8. The Rise of Fashion Forecasting and Fashion Public Relations, 1920 1940: The History of Tobé and Bernays; Véronique Pouillard 9. 'The Beauty Soap of Film Stars': Lux Toilet Soap, Star Endorsements, and Building a Global Beauty Brand; Christina Burr 10. Beauty, Cosmetics, and Vernacular Ethnology in Weimar and Nazi Germany; Uta G. Poiger PART III: APPROPRIATIONS AND AGENCY IN AFRICA AND ASIA 11. Contesting Beauty Concepts in Precolonial and Colonial Kenya: Hierarchy, Resistance, and Identity; Christiane Reichart-Burikukiye 12. Imported Surgeries? Accounting for the Rise of Tehran's Nose-Job Industry; Sara Lenehan 13. Embodying Modernity: The Thrills and Ills of Being a Beautiful Woman in Tana Karo, North Sumatra; Karin Klenke

'Chock full of useful information and marvelous counterintuitive insights alike, this spectacular collection demonstrates the enormous cultural and economic ramifications of the global pursuit of beauty. Ranging from Jewish pageant queens and the Nazi cosmetics industry through Kikuyu headshavings in Kenya, lipstick in Sumatra, and muscle-men in the postwar U.S. to Muslim male nose jobs in present-day Tehran, the essays scramble all our assumptions about what is traditional and what is modern. This is a fabulous and compelling book.' - Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA, and author of Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History 'This volume reveals the centrality of beauty and appearance in modern societies, illuminating consumer cultures, technologies of the body, and concepts of identity and difference in the twentieth century. With topics ranging from cosmetics and soap to beauty pageants and plastic surgery, these excellent essays give particular insight into the tensions between the global expansion of Western beauty culture and the tenacity of local practices.' - Kathy Peiss, Nichols Professor of American History, University of Pennsylvania, USA, and author of Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style