...hand hand, it seemed, with the cultivation of female beauty. The New York Times photographed makeup supplies hidden for five years and showed Afghan men holding up posters of film stars and models.

Such news coverage has not been unique in recent years. Similar accounts of women's newfound right to beautify appeared in the 1980s and 1990s when the Chinese government instituted economic reforms, communist rule ended in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union dissolved. Identified in socialist ideology as a corrupt bourgeois practice oppressive to women, cosmetics-use then marked a turn away from totalitarianism to Western-style individualism and autonomy. Comparable stories measured the apparent progress and success of developing nations in the global economy by highlighting the promotion and consumption of American beauty products in South American rain forests and elsewhere.

Americans have exported now ubiquitous images of glamorized, sexualized female beauty -- images of the healthy and exposed body, made-up face, direct and inviting expression -- for over seven decades. In that time, the commercial problem of selling beauty became entangled with a set of ideological positions that supported the larger political and economic goals of the United States in the world. Freedom, democracy, and modernity were signified by an image of artificially enhanced female beauty, youth, and glamour -- an image identified not simply as Western but more specifically as American. As a commodity for export, this odd coupling -- of the broadest ideals of American politics with notions of female beauty and cultural practices typically dismissed as trivial -- deserves a closer examination.

Long before the American beauty industry emerged on the global scene, images of beauty tied to national identities circulated as a kind of currency in the West. Early modern global trade in herbs, chemicals, dyes, and prepared cosmetics sometimes used place names or symbols to convey a sense of the exotic or an aura of exclusivity. Even more important, throughout the period of European nation-building, exploration, and colonization, female beauty types provided a symbolic shorthand with which to articulate perceived social and cultural characteristics of different 'races' and nations. Coded onto female faces and bodies were the Frenchness of fashion-ability, the Englishness of hygiene, and the sensuousness of Orientals and Mediterraneans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these beauty types, imported and readily employed in the marketing of beauty products in the United States, eased American women's reluctance to use cosmetics by linking them to a worldwide tradition of cosmetic arts.

The beauty images that Americans imported would not be the same ones they exported. By the start of the twentieth century, a domestic beauty industry had begun to take shape. The emergent American look -- visible in Gibson Girls and the New Woman -- conveyed an image that was natural, youthful, healthy, and wholesome. It was also associated with a modern outlook, represented by freer sexual expression, a social life outside the home and family, and individualism. These images were successfully adapted by manufacturers, druggists, and beauty salons to promote the sale of skincare products.

The emergence of Hollywood further legitimized an image of American beauty that included makeup and 'natural artifice' in the years during and after World War I. Makeup, lighting, camera work, and the choice of actors came together to create an aura of glamour that went beyond symmetry of form and regular features. At the same time, Hollywood replaced elite distance and the exclusivity of beauty with the knowing look and accessibility of Everywoman. The relationship of these images of female modernity to American identity was neither certain nor untroubled: extreme flappers were often condemned as a national disgrace -- even as winners of a new commercial venture, the Miss America Pageant, came to represent both civic and beauty ideals. These images circulated internationally through...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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