Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry

Jones, a business historian at Harvard Business School, wrote the first full business history of the global beauty industry, covering roughly 1800 to the present. He worked from company archives, trade sources and an oral history project with industry executives.

The argument concerns the creation of demand. Jones holds that the industry did not respond to pre-existing beauty preferences but manufactured and diffused them, first within Western countries and then internationally. Entrepreneurs including Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Eugene Schueller at L'Oreal, Estee Lauder and the founders of Shiseido built brands by associating products with aspirational identities, using advertising, department store counters, beauty salons and later film and television. He documents how the industry defined categories that had not previously existed, including deodorant, and how it standardised a largely white Western ideal of appearance that spread globally through advertising and film, disadvantaging products and preferences outside it.

The structural history covers the shift from small entrepreneurial firms to a small number of global groups through acquisition, the role of distribution channels in determining who succeeds, the persistent importance of France as a source of brand legitimacy in fragrance, the growth of Japanese and later Korean firms, and the emergence of ethnic and natural segments as challenges to the dominant ideal.

Jones is careful about evidence and about the industry's cultural effects, and he does not adopt either the industry's self-presentation or the standard critique wholesale. The book is long and organised thematically, which produces repetition. It predates the shift to social media marketing, direct-to-consumer brands and Korean beauty's global expansion, which changed distribution and brand-building substantially after 2010.