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.

Autorentext
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 Born in Me Productions. She is a longtime columnist for the Guardian and is a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.

Klappentext

**'Celebrates women how they are, as they are' GILLIAN ANDERSON
'There's something on every page of this book that you didn't know before' SATHNAM SANGHERA
'Brave and honest' ELIF SHAFAK

A global exploration of ancestral beauty practices by the Sunday Times-bestselling author of Brit(ish)

OUR BODIES TELL OUR STORY.**

This powerful global history of beauty by the Sunday Times-bestselling author of Brit(ish) Afua Hirsch dismantles the colonial falsehoods that shape our sense of belonging and celebrates the pioneering stories and ideas of women from marginalised groups.

'Remarkable' OBSERVER
'Intimate' GUARDIAN
'Vital' i PAPER