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How do we determine what is beautiful? Whose standards are we trying to meet when we spend our hard-earned money on our haircare, skincare and makeup; where do they come from, and how can we learn to undo them? Upon getting her first tattoo at 40 years old, award-winning journalist Afua Hirsch embarked on a journey to reclaim her body from the colonial ideas of purity, adornment and ageing she - and many of us - absorbed while growing up. Informed by research from around the world, Afua will look at how individual and collective notions of what is beautiful are constructed or stripped away from us. Through personal anecdotes, interviews from beauty experts, practitioners and service users, she explores the global history of skin, hair and body modification rituals. These insights and discoveries will empower readers to reconnect with their cultures of origin, better understand the link between beauty and politics, and liberate themselves from mainstream beauty standards that aren''t serving them.
About the author
Afua Hirsch is a writer, filmmaker, and journalist. She is the author of
Brit(ish), the
Sunday Times bestseller that explores Britishness, identity and belonging, for which she was awarded the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction. She co-presented
Enslaved, a 6-part series about the transatlantic slave trade with Samuel L Jackson. She is the presenter of the
Audible podcast series
We Need To Talk About the British Empire, and
Africa Rising, an ongoing flagship series about art and culture for the BBC, through her production company B
orn in Me Productions. She is a longtime columnist for the
Guardian and is a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.
