Geoffrey Jones

On his book Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry

Cover Interview of January 02, 2011

In a nutshell

This book tells the story of how a small, often morally dubious, craft industry in the nineteenth century grew to be the $330 billion global powerhouse.

There are many books written about the beauty industry. But few treat it seriously as a business, and even fewer take a global view of how this industry grew, and what are the consequences. This is the gap I wanted to fill.

Beauty Imagined is the product of five years research, in archives around the world, and numerous interviews with many of the leading figures in the industry today. And I pursue three big themes.

First, I try to uncover the entrepreneurs and firms in each generation who built the industry. The journey takes me through a rich tapestry of colorful figures, from FranÃ§ois Coty, who smashed his first perfume on the floor of a prominent Parisian department store to get attention, to Charles Revson, the brilliant if misogynist entrepreneur who build Revlon through crooked TV game shows and eavesdropping on the telephone calls of competitors.

Beauty, it turns out, is a social construct. My second big theme is the role of business in shaping what we today think is beautiful.

The third theme is whether this is a legitimate industry. Beauty is a big business, whose products we use every day. But it should also be seen as playing another and very important role in all our lives. Attractive people earn higher wages, and are more likely to be acquitted by juries, than people deemed to be less attractive. I explore whether the beauty industry has done a good job as a gatekeeper of what is considered attractive.

history / globalization / gender / race / business / france / capitalism / japan / marketing / entrepreneurship /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009