Beautypdf

Introduction

Beauty is commonly interpreted as subjective, yet there is perhaps no better indicator of what a society deems attractive, valuable, and good than in the way it defines beauty. Beauty is also ambiguous, potentially fraudulent, carrying with it the spectre of ugliness, decay, and disappearance. Beauty is certainly both an affective force and a social relation. When actively invested in, beauty is an accomplishment that speaks of human creativity and a desire for (self-)fashioning, as well as of structural norms and oppression. What makes beauty interesting to think with is exactly this paradox: beauty may function simultaneously as what makes people dream and what haunts them, what drives people in everyday life, but also what makes them feel excluded—potentially perfectible, but never quite perfect. Beauty is also an increasingly global, consistently growing, multi-billion-dollar market with profound effects on everyday practices, human subjectivities, and ecologies that encompass humans and other species. In neoliberal consumer capitalism, beauty is a selling point and embodying it is a form of capital.

Scholarly engagement with beauty emerged from the writings of Enlightenment philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who was interested in the judgement of beauty and differentiated between an elevated moral aesthetic sphere, what he called ‘the sublime’, and the morally dubious tinkering with one’s given body for beauty (Wenzel 2009). The implicit devaluation of beauty practices as silly, superfluous, and vain, something that is engaged in by women rather than men, reflected and further cemented patriarchal thinking. Accordingly, early feminist engagement with beauty has emphasised the objectification of the female body in patriarchal consumer society and by the ‘gaze of the Other’ (Young 1980). Early feminists analysed a ‘double bind’ of beauty, with those gendered female being expected to submit to gendered beauty norms while simultaneously being morally judged for the same operation (Bartky 1988). Furthermore, they focused on beauty as a ‘myth’ and ‘work’ for women that they were expected to complete in a ‘third shift’ after their first shift as wage earners and their second shift as homemakers (Wolf [1991] 2002). More recently, scholars have shown that ‘aesthetic labour’ (Elias et al. 2017, Nickshon and Warhurst 2020), i.e. the active investment in outer appearance and beauty for presentability and personal success, is commonly and increasingly expected from persons of all genders within neoliberal economies.

In social and cultural anthropology, beauty has long received surprisingly little attention on a conceptual or analytical level, though local conceptions of beauty and acts of bodily adornment have always been present in ethnographic accounts. Beauty gained significance in anthropology with the discipline’s renewed focus on the body since the 1980s, with the initial focus on aesthetic body modifications such as tattooing, scarification, or piercing from a cross-cultural perspective (e.g., Rubin 1992).

Following the global expansion of the beauty industry in the early 2000s, in recent years anthropologists have analysed aesthetic desires, body norms and images, and practices of beautification as deeply affective projects of self-making and being made, as when persons undergo aesthetic body modification in response to (social) media trends. Determining who we are may be embedded in transnational ideas and practices yet it also reflects particular cultural, social, and mediated ‘beautyscapes’, i.e. specific flows of beauty-related ideas, objects, people, and processes (Holliday et al. 2015). Many of these recent studies are in close conversation with sociology, gender studies, media studies, and affect theory, giving rise to an emerging field of interdisciplinary critical beauty studies (Craig 2021). Following this line of inquiry, the present entry considers beauty as embodied, intimate, and ‘political’; that is, bound up with power differentials of race, class, and gender.

What follows is a brief account of the scholarly debate of beauty in Euro-American thinking, followed by anthropology’s focus on beauty as culturally diverse and tied to power, social rites, and values. The entry then delves into more recent studies on the global beauty industry and how it plays out in different geographical settings. Finally, it shows why beauty is to be taken seriously as a human desire, one that is embedded in everyday practices and storytelling, and that moves people across the globe.

Beauty as aesthetics

To understand Euro-American ways of thinking about beauty, which have shaped anthropological debates and tend to inform global cosmetic and medical practices, it is crucial to look into the emergence of aesthetics as a philosophical field in the eighteenth century. Drawing on a classical textual corpus, philosophers such as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) and Kant were interested in the universal or a priori conditions of beauty. Especially influential in this regard is the Kantian notion of ‘the sublime’, defined as the highest form of beauty, inspiring awe and respect, rather than mere pleasure, and ultimately triggering a contemplation that leads towards morality and ‘free will’. Deeply rooted in Euro-American dualist thinking, this notion is based on a moral distinction between an ethical aesthetic on the one hand—one that arouses ‘a feeling of the furtherance of life’ (Kant [1790] 1911, 244)—and an everyday concern with outer appearances and things which are ‘merely pretty’ on the other. The devaluation of the everyday care for one’s embodied appearance and aesthetic well-being as trivial, frivolous, and silly that is implicit in this thinking also gave rise to a distinction between an almost sacred, disembodied kind of ‘natural’ beauty and an ultimately immoral tinkering with one’s bodily appearance in which beauty appears as deceptive or fraudulent.

Enlightenment thinking on aesthetics also gave rise to the assumption that embodied beauty could be assessed and established transculturally, through symmetry, proportion, and harmony, involving a judgement of taste. In the nineteenth century, this notion was taken up by both artists and empirical scientists, such as Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), whose concepts of the average man and the body-mass index (Quetelet [1842] 2013)—rooted in dominant notions of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and gender—continue to inform the perception of bodies today (cf. Davis 1995). More recently, evolutionary psychologists have attempted to collect evidence for the assumption of beauty as a norm, for example, by showing that study participants preferred symmetrical and average human faces produced through digital morphing over ‘real’ faces (e.g., Rhodes et al. 2002). In some of these studies, the claim that embodied aesthetics are measurable cross-culturally is linked to assumptions of success through beauty, both in terms of biological reproduction (Etcoff 2000) and economically (Hamermesh and Biddle 1994; Hamermesh 2011).

Anthropologists have faulted such approaches for positing biological rather than social bases for inequality and oppression, and for falsely assuming universal, seemingly timeless beauty standards. Yet, they also found that assumptions of bodily aesthetics as measurable and, indeed, workable through human standards continue to inform cosmopolitan medical practice. For example, in the field of plastic and aesthetic surgery, American surgeons commonly rely on metrics of the average female face to conduct facial feminisation surgery on trans women (Plemons 2017). Likewise, surgery on eyelids, breasts, or noses has been described as informed by textbook standards of those bodily features that rely on colonial, racialised, and gendered assumptions – a fact that sometimes also becomes clear from their naming, e.g., the ‘correction of the negroid nose’ (cf. Edmonds 2010, 145). Here, the post-Enlightenment notion of the normative, standard, or average as beautiful serves as an ideological ‘principle of coercion’ (Foucault 1995, 184) embedded in and promoted by disciplinary regimes and social institutions such as racial capitalism and white supremacy. Thus, normalising beauty standards are often part of colonial and state violence, for example in Brazil, where the colonial notion of ‘miscegenation’ continues to inform aesthetic hierarchies and cosmetic practices (Jarrín 2027). Against this background, anthropological accounts have emphasised the immense variety in how beauty is defined and made salient across the globe. Ethnographic research, the following sections will show, has given rise to an understanding of beauty as a serious, even cosmological concern embedded in people’s everyday lives and rituals.

Beauty as ritual, value, and magic

In anthropological accounts, embodied beauty is closely linked to social power, and acts of beautification or embellishment are often described in relation to the acquisition of new skills and status, or what anthropologists of religion have called ‘rites of passage’ (van Gennep 1909; Turner 1969). When adolescents engage in or are subject to tattooing, the piercing of ears, noses, or lips, circumcision, the staining or removal of teeth, or the wearing of special clothing, hairstyles, or ornaments in initiation rites or rites before marriage, the resulting insignia carry meanings that transcend the aesthetic, being ‘statements about transition’ (Rush 2005, 55) that mark the body ritually, and sometimes, permanently. Ideal beauty is first and foremost the stuff of gods and goddesses, as well as (divine) kings and queens: The divine kings of Ethiopia, for example, like the Zulu and Sofala kings, were chosen ‘for their size, strength, and beauty’ (Frazer [1894] 2012, 205). Grounded in the prophecy that an imperfect king will bring ‘great calamities’ upon the entire community, these kings were put to death as soon as ‘any bodily defect or sign of decay’ (Frazer [1894] 2012, 205) appeared on the person—a broken tooth, a scar, a symptom of old age. In the beauty parlours of Bangalore, the magical and mundane come together as women strive towards glamour and allure as attributes of the divine feminine that is deeply rooted in the Hindu imagination (Srinivas 2025).

Whereas today beauty and acts of beautification are commonly gendered as female, and feminist scholars have analysed beauty as an existential symbol of femininity (Bartky 1990), much of the early anthropological work on beauty focuses on men, in particular men elsewhere, given the colonial roots of the discipline. For example, the male participants in the Trobriand Islands’ kula exchange, studied by Bronislaw Malinowski in the early twentieth century, used makeup produced by ‘crushed betel-nut mixed with lime’ as well as magic spells of beauty to make men ‘beautiful, attractive and irresistible to their Kula partners’. Thereby, they imitated regional myths that recount how ‘an old, ugly and ungainly man becomes transformed by his magic into a radiant and charming youth’ (Malinowski [1922] 2002, 346).

The magical aspects of bodily grooming have long been emphasised in anthropological discussions of hair in particular (Leach 1958; Obeyesekere 1981; Ramberg 2009; Stewart and Strathern 2019). Hairdressing is often tied to ritual practices fraught with sexualised meanings, supported by psychoanalytical interpretations of hair-related behaviour and activities as having sexual overtones (Leach 1958). For example, in a South Indian goddess or devi cult, the matted locks of hair called jade, mostly worn by female ecstatics or devadasis who are dedicated to the goddess, are seen as a manifestation of the goddess’s presence in their bodies. The jade locks give them the power to enter states of possession and act as oracles (Ramberg 2009). Government-sponsored campaigns to cut and wash devadasis’ hair with the intention to ‘clean’ them, but also, to discipline their nonconforming sexuality, threaten devadasis in their very existence. Hair in this context functions ‘not merely as a communicative sign, but as a material mode and medium of power in the body’ (Ramberg 2009, 504).

An especially striking ethnography of the social value of beauty comes from the Brazilian Kayapo in the Amazon basin, studied by Terence Turner since the 1960s (Turner [1980] 2012). Kayapo society is divided between ‘common’ and ‘beautiful’ people, where the latter have wider kin networks and greater access to resources. Among the Kayapo, beauty is an accomplishment acquired over the life course, and cleanliness is an important component thereof. In practices such as thorough washing, the removal of facial and body hair, painting the body in different colours, dressing, lip-piercing, or applying cosmetics, the skin is transformed ‘from a mere “natural” envelope of the physical body into a sort of social filter’ i.e. into a canvas for expressing people’s personal preferences and social relations with one another (Turner 2012, 488). Beauty here is linked not only to acts of bodily embellishment, but also to the perfection of public speaking and social refinement. Thus, Kayapo women and men deemed worthy in terms of age and status may receive ‘beautiful’ names in a ritual that is tied to particular age sets. Beauty thus becomes a ‘total social fact’ (Mauss [1950] 2002), a domain of social life that is inseparable from the economic or cosmological realms of society.

This becomes even clearer when looking at the dark side of beauty in Kayapo society (Turner 2017). For the Kayapo, the jaguar embodies ultimate beauty, but also bestiality and fear. The jaguar’s idealisation makes visible the ‘troubling ambivalence’ of beauty (Turner 2017, 54), as persons known for their beauty are seen as particularly vulnerable to a condition called aybanh, an antisocial madness caused by bodily contact with the blood or hair of a (killed) jaguar. Here, beautiful people are not just more powerful, but also more vulnerable than ‘common’ people. This ambivalence of beauty is echoed in social power dynamics, which are inherently unstable, and in processes of objectification and de-objectification of the body involved in becoming beautiful and being recognised as such: On the one hand, the body becomes beautiful by embodying social distinction and competence. On the other hand, while aging, the body also decomposes, turning into soil after death, thereby losing its distinction and competence over time. In this sense, beauty is enacted as tragic and the body is ‘the symbolic stage on which the drama of socialization is enacted’ (Turner 2012, 486).

The assessment of beauty as tragic, with bodily decay looming large on the horizon, may resonate with present-day cosmetic surgery patients and customers of beauty salons who engage in their own beauty rituals. Indeed, as the ethnographic literature on beauty salons and barber shops has shown, these places are often visited not for their outright beauty, but for the care, bodily pampering, and sociality that they also commonly provide (e.g. Barber 2006; Black 2004; Furman 1997; Kang 2010; Ossman 2002).

Global markets, local bodies

While transnational beauty markets can be traced back to the commercialisation of French perfumery in the late eighteenth century and the circulation of raw materials, products, and fashion trends within colonial empires in the nineteenth century (e.g. Thomas 2020), it was not until the late 1980s that a truly global beauty and cosmetics market emerged (Jones 2010). Ever since then, this market, centred around Paris and New York as its first global hubs, has continued to grow into a multi-billion-dollar industry, with new regional markets emerging in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Turkey, and megabrands such as L’Oréal or Procter & Gamble, but also non-Western brands such as Shiseido or Kao, establishing themselves worldwide. Even before this spread, beauty commodities have played a key role in the making of ‘modern’ subjectivities through their transnationally circulating images, products, and technologies, creating novel desires and anxieties across the globe (e.g. Burke 1996, Thomas 2020). Earlier feminist studies of the beauty industry had been largely sceptical of it. Their criticism emphasised the objectification of female bodies and the detrimental effects of women’s engagement with beauty, which they characterised as wasting time and money by trying to reach unreachable gendered ideals and by being trapped in an endless spiral of self-hatred and self-esteem in the process of doing so (Bordo 1993; Felski 2006; Wolf [1991] 2002).

However, anthropologists have also pointed to the fact that the beauty industry has opened up more-than-local spaces of imagination, especially for persons gendered female or from lower social strata, for example, in Brazil (Edmonds 2007, 2010; Jarrín 2017), Colombia (Taussig 2012), Japan (Miller 2006), Venezuela (Ochoa 2014) and China (Hua 2013). Ethnographic fieldwork in cosmetic surgery settings in Brazil, for example, has shown that bodily beautification is driven in part by fantasies of social mobility, modernity, and glamour (Edmonds 2007). This has given rise to the question of whether engagement with commodified beauty as a form of bodily capital may even be understood as a tool of empowerment for the marginalised and disenfranchised.

Since the early 2000s, the significance of the global beauty market has been hotly debated. That is because it rests on commodities and technologies that render standards of beauty increasingly uniform and, arguably, more Western. Thus, the global beauty and fashion industries are often described as dominated by Western or Caucasian beauty norms, designers, and brands, such as L’Oreal, Estée Lauder, Unilever, and Procter & Gamble, promulgated by mass media (e.g. Jafar & de Casanova 2013, Jha 2016). From this perspective, beauty practices such as skin-whitening, hair-straightening, or surgery, such as ‘double eyelid surgery’ in Asia, are attempts to mimic Western or Caucasian beauty ideals as global hegemonic norms.

In contrast, anthropologists have demonstrated that, in their quest for beauty, modernity, or enhancement, bodies are embedded in multiple collective fantasies that are often shaped, but not fully determined by, Western or ‘global’ images. For example, in Taiwanese bridal photography, the photographic staging of the bride as a ‘Western baby doll’, heavily influenced by US American imagery of feminine beauty, is the most popular yet not the only theme available, competing with K-pop images, for example. Moreover, by creatively staging the US theme, photographers create bridal representations that are still perceived as ‘modern’ and ‘Chinese’ rather than ‘American’ (Adrian 2003). The huge beauty and cosmetic surgery market in Brazil has been interpreted as ‘indigenized’, because it operates in an encounter between globalised mass media, cosmopolitan medicine, and ‘a distinctive logic of aesthetics and race in Brazil’ (Edmonds 2007, 374). Notions such as ‘beautyscape’ (Holliday et al. 2015) or ‘beauty cultures’ (Jafar & de Casanova 2013) have been coined to explain transnational yet also particular cultural, social, and mediated practices and sets of ideas about bodily attractiveness that often coexist with other such ‘scapes’ or ‘cultures’ in the same terrain.

This debate echoes wider discussions on ‘globalization’ and the (new) global economy, in which anthropologists have shown that global goods and images are never simply adopted or consumed, but are given diverse meanings and are appropriated, refashioned, or rejected in various ways in different social strata and local contexts around the world (e.g. Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996). Given that beauty consumption is bound up with assumptions of the racialised, classed, and gendered body, beauty practices such as aesthetic surgery or skin-whitening also contribute to making visible inequalities that may remain overlooked in self-proclaimed ‘postracial’ and democratic societies (Tate 2016).

Finally, ethnographies have also shown that, in some settings, notions of beauty are so diametrically opposed to the images propagated by the global beauty industry that they remain seemingly unaffected. For instance, among higher caste Azawagh Arabs in Niger, the active ‘fattening’ of adolescent girls is an ongoing cultural practice, even though the Azawagh are well aware of the beauty industry’s emphasis on slim femininity (Popenoe 2004). They perceive the female models they encounter on urban billboards as gaunt rather than slim, and these images trigger ridicule in Niger, while in Euro-American societies the common response to such images is women’s loss of self-esteem (Bordo 1993). This may be due to the fact that female fatness is valued not only for the health and proper femininity that it is associated with, but also because it is desired as erotic, with male interlocutors joyfully describing the sexual appeal of fat skin to the ethnographer (Popenoe 2004, 190ff.).

Despite these ethnographic findings, the global beauty market in its commodified form is bound for extension. In contemporary neoliberal consumer capitalism, scholars have analysed an intensified ‘beauty pressure’ (Elias, Gill and Scharff 2017) that extends across various periods in the life course, such as childhood or older age, as well as across body parts—eyebrows, upper thighs, the armpit, even the anus—that were previously seen as unaffected by this pressure. In recent years, this has brought scholarly attention to the affective dimensions of beauty, as well as its ecological effects.

Beauty as an affective force

Recent anthropological studies speak of beauty’s importance as an affective force, i.e. its capability to trigger and shape strong emotions. This force does not work in a vacuum, but rather is situated in larger bio- and technopolitical arrangements, such as labour regimes, import regulations, or digital algorithms. These studies also show how the ubiquitous promise and production of beauty may both cement and disturb existing power hierarchies in various ways. They bring into focus both the role of the state and state actors as well as of digital technologies and infrastructures in relation to beauty. Thus, governments and state actors may ‘recruit’ beauty in an effort to achieve more efficient governance, as when American funding goes into the establishment of a beauty school in Kabul (Nguyen 2011). While for its trainees, the school and its adjacent beauty salon become ‘an oasis amid the ugliness of war,’ the author Mimi Thi Nguyen criticises the familiar theme of saving Muslim women from ugliness, in this case through beauty treatments and makeup as an act of ‘biopower’, a pedagogy of the gendered body which is embedded in broader political projects, such as the liberalisation of markets. In China, multi-million-dollar investments in beauty pageants, salons, and training initiatives by the state target the looks of ethnic minorities, such as Uyghurs, in particular (Grose and Leibold 2016). The pressure on individual citizens to embody social norms and political imaginations such as ‘progress’ or ‘modernity’, which is behind this government-sponsored ‘Project Beauty’, forms part of a historical trajectory of ‘somatic engineering’ (Gimpel 2013); that is, the state’s attempts to actively shape bodies as part of its project of modernisation. In Venezuela, a nation that has repeatedly won the international Miss World beauty contest, the production of ‘spectacular femininities’ through beauty investments has become part of the political economy, one in which marginalised populations invest in their bodies to radiate glamour, despite multiple national crises (Ochoa 2014).

Likewise, in Brazil, cosmetic surgery is desired across the social divide and actively sought out by the urban poor, who subject themselves to treatment in publicly-sponsored beauty clinics that function as testing grounds for new procedures, despite the health risks this involves (Jarrín 2017). In a society where cosmetic surgery is somewhat normalised and an attractive bodily appearance is key, prospective cosmetic surgery patients are ‘caught in a paradoxical bind between the affective promises and the biopolitical costs of surgery’ (Jarrín 2017, 158). The affective power of beauty, glamour, or civility that is reflected in images of the ‘good’ citizen often invokes a desire to belong. Thereby, when beauty ideals and standards are not attained, they may also give rise to feelings of exclusion (e.g. Liebelt 2019; Kukuczka and Liebelt 2024).

In close conversation with media studies and affect theory, anthropological studies have also emphasised the role of digital infrastructures and social media in shaping aspirations for glamour and beauty. Thus, across the world, consumers of beauty products and services can be described as ‘“plugged in” to the transnational’ (Dosekun 2020, 107) through their social media accounts, with a significant increase in globally circulating digital beauty content. Adolescents encounter the beauty industry first and foremost on their phones, in the form of advertisement, social media postings, and different kinds of apps, including photo-editing, personal tutelage, or try-out apps (e.g. Coleman and Figueroa 2010; Gill 2023). The resulting images give rise to ‘new forensic and metricized ways of looking at the self and others’ (Gill 2023, 75) such as when the appearance of noses, pores, or other facial features are checked closely to learn how they might be improved. These technologies also increase particularly young peoples’ ultimately unfulfillable desire to look ‘perfect’. Thus, in her research with young people in the UK between 2020-2022, Rosalind Gill found that the significant increase in beauty content since the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to young women seeing their own faces and bodies as ‘not good enough, as failing’, also documenting the ways various beauty apps make connections to cosmetic investments, including cosmetic surgeries (2023, 75).

Professional ‘retouchers’ have long since and routinely employed image cosmetics to process and enhance the images of models for the advertising industry, including for display in the glossy pages of fashion magazines. Much like the artificial intelligence of beauty apps, as well as beauty therapists or cosmetic surgeons, retouchers look closely at human bodies—in particular, faces—removing wrinkles, blemishes, freckles, or blackheads by ‘zooming in’ (Webb 2025). Threatened by ‘one-click’ beauty apps and AI, retouchers have come to reflect critically on hegemonic beauty norms and the industry, emphasising that they produce more ‘inclusive’, potentially less harmful images, with their skills constituting a form of art (Webb 2025).

Digitally enhanced images and the ubiquitous promise of beauty not only trigger beauty consumption—they also function as a ‘feeling’ (e.g. Coleman and Figueroa 2010; Nguyen 2024). Following social media campaigns such as the body positivity movement or #unfairandlovely, which targeted consumer goods giant Unilever’s Fair & Lovely skin cream for being inherently colourist (Jha 2016), the global beauty industry has not only diversified its models but also shifted its rhetoric. Thus, beauty is increasingly about feeling beautiful and, by extension, confident, empowered, and happy (Gill 2023; Nguyen 2024). As an affectively mediated ‘promise of happiness’, beauty may be understood as a disciplinary technology that conceals the unhappiness that is buried beneath it (cf. Ahmed 2010). In that sense, by excavating the technopolitical and historical entanglements of beauty and its images, as well as the chemical, sometimes ‘toxic’ substances of its products (skin-whiteners, cosmetics, fragrances, etc.), anthropologists have become the occasional ‘killjoys’ of beauty (Ahmed 2017).

For instance, the history of Retin-A—a globally successful ‘cosmeceutical’ (i.e. a cosmetic product with bioactive ingredients)—shows the intimate links between science, beauty, and histories of violence, particularly racial and imperial violence. Co-invented and sold by dermatologist Albert Kligman as a result of his experiments on prisoners in the US and intended for use during the ‘chemical war’ in Vietnam, it is used today for skin creams around the world. It is also used in a small beauty spa on the edges of Ho Chi Minh City (Tu 2021). The visitors of that spa, female factory workers of Vietnam’s booming textile sector and women living in former battle zones, often suffer from disfiguring skin conditions that are the result of chemical contamination in toxic work environments as well as of soil, food, and water. Seeking beauty and relief through different chemical composites, that is, through cosmetics or pharmaceutics, their bodies speak of present-day ‘chemical relations’ (Murphy 2017), including in the world of beauty.

Conclusion: The future of beauty

As an aesthetic value, beauty in and of itself is formless. Yet it certainly moves, as in the smell of a rose, the song of a bird, or a poem, which one might list among the things one deems beautiful. In aesthetic theory, building on poetic lists of objects of beauty, beauty commonly functions as a ‘scene setter’, serving as an inspirational reference that reminds the reader of ‘how one ought to live and what conditions enable such a life’ (Nguyen 2024, 28f.). Anthropology has likewise contested the assumption that concerns with aesthetics, even bodily ones, are superfluous, silly, and morally questionable yet pointed to the acts of beautification and its multiple social meanings. Accordingly, this entry has considered beauty as embodied, relational, and powerful. Beauty concerns and acts of beautification have been shown to reflect social values other than beauty and make visible inequalities along the lines of race, class, age, and gender. In ethnographic research, the close attention to aesthetic desires and acts of making the body beautiful offer insights into a multitude of affective, but also ethical and biopolitical, arrangements. In close conversation with other disciplines, the anthropology of beauty deepens understandings of both the promises and the recruitment of beauty for moving bodies across time and space in physical and imaginative ways.

In all these ways, beauty offers an excellent vantage point for the anthropological study of the transnational circulation of images, commodities, and services and how these are materialised in and on the body. Studying beauty thereby reflects but also exposes how our senses and bodily being-in-the-world structure social life and how people think about their links to the divine. Not least, anthropology is urgently needed for analysing critically how beauty as an affective form of power may be put to work in ways that obscure the often unsightly, even toxic, configurations of contemporary capitalism and more-than-human ecologies.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), under grant number 433753905.

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Note on contributor

Claudia Liebelt is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her work explores beauty in relation to the body and the senses, gender and sexualities, as well as religion in the Middle East and Turkey. She has authored Istanbul appearances: Beauty and the making of middle-class femininities in urban Turkey (2023, Syracuse University Press) and edited Beauty and the norm: Debating standardization in bodily appearance (2018, Palgrave MacMillan).

Claudia Liebelt (ORCID 0000-0002-3131-6628), Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Landoltweg 9–11, FU Berlin, D-14195 Berlin (Germany), Email: claudia.liebelt@fu-berlin.de