Lipstick, Manicures … And Fascism: The Ugliness Behind the $450BN Beauty Industry

The very first sentence of Arabelle Sicardi’s book, The House of Beauty, reads: “When I tell you that beauty is a monster, I need you to know it is my favorite kind.”

Sicardi, who splits their time between New York City and Los Angeles, has a love/hate relationship with the beauty industry. A writer and consultant working in beauty and tech, their projects include a beauty newsletter, a creative collective called Perfumed Pages and a non-profit arts project called the Museum of Nails Foundation. In their new book, they examine the impact of the $450bn beauty industry – the pretty and the very ugly.

Sicardi has written about beauty as “a terrorizing force” for their whole career, including a stint as a beauty editor at BuzzFeed, which proved a spiky learning experience. “I wrote a story critical of an advertising campaign and then got flak for it,” they recall. “I decided to leave because I didn’t want to deal with the politics and the insincerity of being told I can do something, but then having my work deleted. That type of situation still happens very regularly to writers for publications to this day,” they said.

In an era of unrealistic beauty standards, such ambivalence needs little explanation. But Sicardi interweaves deeper strands: the beauty industry’s relationship to the climate crisis, the markup on basic goods like shampoo in US prisons and how the history of nail salons in the US relates to the Vietnam war.