Best friends Mia and Mel are living their best lives running their own cosmetics company they've built from the ground up. Unfortunately, they're in over their heads financially, and the prospect of a big buyout offer from a notorious titan of the cosmetics industry Claire Luna proves too tempting to pass up, putting Mel and Mia's lifelong friendship in jeopardy. The beauty business is about to get ugly.

"This fast-paced novel examines the lives, loves, and sacrifices of the visionaries who invented the modern cosmetics industry: Josiah Herzenstein, born in a Polish Jewish Shtlel, the entrepreneur who transforms herself into a global style icon and the richest woman in the world, Josephine Herz; Constance Gardiner, her rival, the ultimate society woman who invents the door-to-door business and its female workforce but whose deepest secret threatens...

"Made Up: How the Beauty Industry Manipulates Consumers, Preys on Women's Insecurities, and Promotes Unattainable Beauty Standards takes a hard look at the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, which promotes unrealistic beauty standards, perpetuates gender stereotypes, and uses sexual objectification to sell products. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 explores the global beauty industry, traces the cultural history of cosmetics, examines...

"Founder of a beauty empire, Madam C. J. Walker was celebrated as America's first self-made female millionaire in the early 1900s. Known as a leading African American entrepreneur, Walker was also devoted to an activist philanthropy aimed at empowering African Americans and challenging the injustices inflicted by Jim Crow. Tyrone McKinley Freeman's biography highlights how giving shaped Walker's life before and after she became wealthy. Poor and widowed...

"A young woman gets pulled into Estée Lauder's enigmatic orbit as the future cosmetic icon prepares to take the world by storm. From the USA Today bestselling author of The Social Graces and Park Avenue Summer comes a story of friendship, glitz, and glamour in 1940s New York. New York City, 1938. Gloria Downing is done with lies. Eager to distance herself from a family scandal, what she needs is a total makeover and a friend she can lean on -- and...

Madam C. J. Walker is reputed to be America's first self-made woman millionaire. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress. By the time of her death in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and president of a hair-care empire...

Helena Rubinstein was born into a poor Polish family at the end of the 19th century; by the time of her death in 1965 she had built a cosmetics empire that spanned the world. This is her amazing life story.

"With a sharp sense of justice and humor, Susan J. Douglas confronts ageism against women in media, work, and politics. In the 1970s, baby boom women began to redefine women's lives and opportunities. Now, that they are the largest American female generation over fifty, Susan J. Douglas argues that these feminist boomers are again challenging outdated stereotypes, and reinventing what it means to be older and female. This is a demographic revolution,...