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Perfection

400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty
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Brief Description
A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women... Read More
Format: Hardback
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A colourful account of women’s health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today’s viral trends

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A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends

Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in the 1880s promoted woollen underwear to keep colds at bay. Beautification and the pursuit of health may seem all-consuming today, but their history is long and fantastically varied.

Ranging across the last four hundred years, Margarette Lincoln examines women's health and beauty in fascinating detail. Through first-hand accounts and reports of physicians, quacks, and advertising, Lincoln captures women's lived experience of consuming beauty products, and the excitementβ€”and traumaβ€”of adopting the latest fashion trends.

Considering everything from body sculpture, diet, and exercise to skin, teeth, and hair, Perfection is a vibrant account of women's body-fashioningβ€”showing how intimately these practices are related to community and identity throughout history.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780300264586

Publisher: Yale University Press

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 10 September 2024

Country: United States

Imprint: Yale University Press

Illustration: 32 color + 16 b-w illus.

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 156.0mm

Height: 235.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 368

About the Author

Margarette Lincoln was a visiting researcher at the University of Portsmouth and is curator emerita of the National Maritime Museum. She is the author of numerous books, including London and the Seventeenth Century and Trading in War, which was shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize.

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  • London and the Seventeenth Century
    The first comprehensive history of seventeenth-century London, told through the lives of those who experienced it β€œLively and arresting. . . . [Lincoln] is as confident in handling the royal ceremonials of political transition . . . as she is with London's thriving coffee-house culture, and its turbulent maritime community.”—Ian W. Archer, Times Literary Supplement β€œLincoln has a curator’s gift...
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  • Trading in War
    Trading in War by Margarette Lincoln offers a vivid account of the forgotten citizens of maritime London who sustained Britain during the Revolutionary Wars. In the half-century before the Battle of Trafalgar, the port of London became the commercial nexus of a global empire and the launch pad of Britain’s military campaigns in North America and Napoleonic Europe. The unruly...
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