The Science of Beauty Culture and Cosmetics in Modern Germany, 17501930 [Hardcover]

What did the cosmetic practices of middle-class women in the nineteenth century have in common with the repair of men's bodies mutilated in war? What did the New Woman of the Weimar years have to do with the field of social medicine that emerged in the same period? They were all part of a conversation about the cosmetic modification of bodies, a debate shaped by scientific knowledge and normative social models. Conceived as a cultural history, this book examines the history of artificially created beauty in Germany from the late Enlightenment to the early days of National Socialist rule.PrefaceIntroduction 1. From Wisdom to Knowledge: Bodies and Artificial Beauty in the Eighteenth Century 2. Regulated Bodies: Cosmetics and Hygiene in the Nineteenth Century 3. Renovated Bodies: Medical Cosmetics from the Fin de Si?cle to the Weimar Republic 4. Simulated Bodies: Cosmetics and Consumption in the Interwar Period 5. Knowledge and Political Conscience: Social Cosmetics during the Great Depression

Annelie Ramsbrock is a research associate at the Center for Contemporary Historical Research in Potsdam, Germany. She received her doctorate in 2010 from the Free University, Berlin.

I enjoyed this book from the very beginning. Its fundamental thesis is as simple as it is convincing. Ideals of beauty must always be grasped as (historically variable) self-descriptions of society. Well-researched and readable, this study makes an exemplary contribution to the history of science and culture. (Luca Giuliani, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany and author of Image and Myth: A History of Pictorial Narration in Greek Art)

This compelling and masterfully researched book shows that what a society sees as beautiful, and the steps taken to achieve beauty and body ideals, has a deep, rich, and changing history. How Germans adorned themselves, how they altered and transformed their faces and bodies, constituted in actual£‡