Published in 2020
304 pages
Martha Laham is a professor at Diablo Valley College, where she has taught business, marketing, and advertising for thirty years. She has authored college textbooks in marketing and selling, developed instructional materials for educational publishers, and contributed to HuffPost. She is the author of The Con Game: A Failure of Trust. She lives in Oakland, California.
What is this book about?
Made Up exposes the multibillion-dollar beauty industry that promotes unrealistic beauty standards through a market basket of advertising tricks, techniques, and technologies.
Cosmetics magnate Charles Revson, a founder of Revlon, was quoted as saying, “In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope.” This pioneering entrepreneur, who built an empire on the foundation of nail polish, captured the unvarnished truth about the beauty business in a single hope in a jar.
Made Up: How the Beauty Industry Manipulates Consumers, Preys on Women’s Insecurities, and Promotes Unattainable Beauty Standards is a thorough examination of innovative, and often controversial, advertising practices used by beauty companies to persuade consumers, mainly women, to buy discretionary goods like cosmetics and scents. These approaches are clearly the average American woman will spend around $300,000 on facial products alone during her lifetime.
This revealing book traces the evolution of the global beauty industry, discovers what makes beauty consumers tick, explores the persistence and pervasiveness of the feminine beauty ideal, and investigates the myth-making power of beauty advertising. It also examines stereotypical portrayals of women in beauty ads, looks at celebrity beauty endorsements, and dissects the “looks industry.”
Made Up uncovers the reality behind an Elysian world of fantasy and romance created by beauty brands that won’t tell women the truth about beauty.
