Overview

Three Faces of Beauty offers a unique approach to understanding globalisation and cultural change based on a comparative, ethnographic study of a nearly universal institution: the beauty salon. Susan Ossman traces the images and words of the beauty industry as they developed historically between Paris, Cairo, and Casablanca and then vividly demonstrates how such images are embodied today in salons located in each city. By examining how images from fashion magazines, film, and advertising are enacted in beauty salons, Ossman is able to demonstrate how embodiment displays and reworks certain hierarchies. While offering the possibility of freedom from the tethers of status, nation, religion, and nature, beauty is created by these very categories and values, Ossman shows. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, she documents the various rituals of welcome, choice-making, pricing practices, and spatial arrangements in salon after salon. She also reveals ways in which patrons in each of the three cities imagine and co-opt looks they believe are fashionable in the other cities. By observing salons as scenes of instruction, Ossman reveals that beautiful bodies evolve within the intertwining contexts of media, modernity, location, time, postcolonialism, and male expectation. Three Faces of Beauty will interest anthropologists as well as scholars of globalization, media and communication, postcolonialism, and women's studies.

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9780822328964

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Reviews

Ossman's trajectory is like the braiding and weaving of hair, like a dance of nimble fingers and scissors. She achieves a rare vividness for which anthropologists often strive but rarely attain. -James Faubion, Rice University Susan Ossman lets us hear women's hopes for beauty and difference-out of or under the head shawl-in Casablanca, Cairo, and Paris. What a pleasure to linger in these beauty shops, where talk, the snipping scissors, and Egyptian songs help open the door to modernity. A delightful and insightful read. -Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University

Ossman's trajectory is like the braiding and weaving of hair, like a dance of nimble fingers and scissors. She achieves a rare vividness for which anthropologists often strive but rarely attain. -James Faubion, Rice University Susan Ossman lets us hear women's hopes for beauty and difference - out of or under the head shawl - in Casablanca, Cairo, and Paris. What a pleasure to linger in these beauty shops, where talk, the snipping scissors, and Egyptian songs help open the door to modernity. A delightful and insightful read. -Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University

Author Information

Susan Ossman is Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. She is the author of Picturing Casablanca: Portraits of Power in a Modern City.

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