Kathy Peiss

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Works

Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

Kathy Peiss

The first social history of American beauty culture: a richly textured account of how women created the cosmetics industry and how cosmetics created the modern woman.

How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a Victorian “kitchen physic,” as homemade cosmetics were called, become a multi-billion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman’s business?

Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, historian Kathy Peiss uncovers a vivid history in…

 
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