Four Books: on Beauty Culture Part Two

I have not read these books yet. this list exists so I don’t forget to come back—to return deliberately to beauty culture once I’m ready to sit with it more seriously. This is part two of what seems to be an emerging beauty culturalist syllabus. This section is more explicitly focused on beauty culture as it has been shaped, practiced, and policed through Black women’s lives. I am interested not only in makeup, but in hair and nails as methods of self-expression and image management—sites where Black women have attempted to influence how they are read, respected, dismissed, or disciplined. The inclusion of Max Factor and Hollywood is mostly so that I don’t forget to read that book. The books on hair and nails function as research: I do not yet have a clear sense of how African American women have historically used hair, makeup, and nails to manage perception in the United States. I understand how I am read in South Africa. Now I need to learn how I am read and understood here. Hair remains the most emotionally charged terrain, shaped by racial and gendered policing that reaches deeply into intimacy, labor, and pain. Nails feel different, but not neutral. They signal class, work, and morality: plain hands as working hands—or as poverty; painted hands as leisure—or as excess.

Fresh Sets: Contemporary Nail Art from Around the World by Tembe Denton-Hurst is a glossy, global snapshot of nail art as culture, craft, and quiet flex—where fingertips become tiny canvases for identity, joy, and imagination.

Fresh Sets: Contemporary Nail Art from Around the WorldTembe Denton-Hurst

Getting a fresh set of nails means different things for every customer, but these days, it’s a form of self-expression like no other—and the styles continue to evolve. This book travels the world to put today’s most inspired nail art at your fingertips. It features profiles of 35 professionals who are carving out a name for themselves on the streets of cities like New York, LA, Vancouver, London, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Punjab, Melbourne/Naarm, and more.

New York magazine writer and beauty expert Tembe Denton-Hurst describes each nail tech, discussing their process, aesthetic, and biggest inspirations, accompanied by photos of their work and firsthand commentary. Her engaging introduction sets the tone, mapping the rich, long history of nail art; there’s also a glossary of terms to help readers understand the variety of techniques that are used.

From kawaii street style to Mexican folk art, chic runway looks to over-the-top 3D sculpture, glimmering gems, slimy insects, hand-painted dreamy moonscapes, and more, Fresh Sets celebrates diversity, individuality, and the limitless possibilities for making a bold statement on a tiny canvas.

Max Factor and Hollywood: A Glamorous History by Erika Thomas traces how makeup helped invent movie stardom—turning faces into icons and beauty into a language of light, illusion, and power.

Max Factor and Hollywood: A Glamorous History by Erika Thomas

When Polish wigmaker and cosmetician Max Factor arrived in Los Angeles at the dawn of the motion picture industry, "make-up" had been associated only with stage performers and ladies of the oldest profession. Appalled by the garish paints worn by actors, Factor introduced the first "flexible" greasepaint for film in 1914. With a few careful brush strokes, a lot of innovation and the kind of luck that can happen only in Hollywood, Max Factor changed the meaning of glamour. His innovations can be experienced in every tube of lipstick, palette of eye shadow and bottle of nail lacquer used today. Join author Erika Thomas as she reveals the makeup guru's expert beauty tips and the story of how he created the most iconic golden-era looks that are as relevant today as they were nearly a century ago.

Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America by Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps is a foundational text—part history, part cultural critique—mapping how Black hair has been shaped by power, resistance, beauty, and self-definition.

Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America  Ayana Byrd  Lori Tharps 

Two world wars, the Civil Rights movement, and a Jheri curl later, Blacks in America continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From the antebellum practice of shaving the head in an attempt to pass as a "free" person to the 1998 uproar over a White third-grade teacher's reading of the book Nappy Hair, the issues surrounding African American hair continue to linger as we enter the twenty-first century.

Hair Story is a historical and anecdotal exploration of Black Americans' tangled hair roots. A chronological look at the culture and politics behind the ever-changing state of Black hair from fifteenth-century Africa to the present-day United States, it ties the personal to the political and the popular.

New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair by Jasmine Nichole Cobb explores Black hair as both material and meaning—where texture, creativity, and history meet in contemporary visual culture.

New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair by Jasmine Nichole Cobb

From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth Jasmine Nichole Cobb traces the history of Afro-textured coiffure, exploring it as a visual material through which to reimagine the sensual experience of Blackness. Through close readings of slave narratives, scrapbooks, travel illustrations, documentary films, and photography as well as collage, craft, and sculpture, from the nineteenth century to the present, Cobb shows how the racial distinctions ascribed to people of African descent become simultaneously visible and tactile. Whether examining Soul Train’s and Ebony’s promotion of the Afro hairstyle alongside styling products or how artists such as Alison Saar and Lorna Simpson underscore the construction of Blackness through the representation of hair, Cobb foregrounds the inseparability of Black hair’s look and feel. Demonstrating that Blackness is palpable through appearance and feeling, Cobb reveals the various ways that people of African descent forge new relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair.

If you have any recomendations, please let me know!