A Beauty Industry Reckoning Centuries in the Making
- Eleonor Botoman
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Arabelle Sicardi’s new book, The House of Beauty, reminds us that care is resistance.
I began reading Arabelle Sicardi’s debut essay collection while I waited to get called back for a mani-pedi at the nail salon. I spent the next hour trying to keep the pages on my lap, stealing glances as I placed my painted fingers under the fluorescence of portable UV lamps. I read it in between getting my legs waxed and my eyebrows threaded. Their book followed me around on errands, crammed between makeup and skincare purchases from Sephora and Ulta, restocks from my favorite K-beauty store in Chinatown, and samples from the niche perfume stores in SoHo. I reached for it when I grew impatient waiting for my dyed hair to process and when I procrastinated on putting on a full face for a night out. Equal parts historical epic, investigative journalism, and memoir, reading The House of Beauty: Lessons From The Image Industry means you’ll never see your hauls, your daily routines, or local salon services the same way again.
From the beginning, Sicardi is determined to show the very real blood, sweat, and tears that underpin the beauty industry. In a chapter titled “Choose Your Own Disaster,” readers begin their dangerous journey at the source of two popular cosmetic ingredients found in 70% of the world’s beauty products — mica mined in India and palm kernel oil harvested in the peatland forests of Malaysia and Indonesia. Sicardi guides us across oceans and continents through the perspectives of these exploited laborers and the journalists and NGOs risking their lives to document these dangerous, often illegal operations. We become a child dying in a mining cave collapse, a cargo ship deckhand held hostage by pirates, a migrant plantation worker with their passport locked away in an administrative office, desperate to return home. We eavesdrop on a Malaysian government lawyer bragging about convincing Indigenous villagers to sign over the rights to their land. We sit in boardrooms where bribes are exchanged, and the destruction of communities and ecosystems is negotiated through corporate meetings. We even become the purchased product in the shower, on the counter, shown off in review videos, and restocked on a shelf by an underpaid retail employee. By following the money from these places to people like Estée Lauder heir Ronald Lauder, noted for his Republican mega-donations, and the under-resourced innovations in foundation shades by Black cosmetic chemist Balanda Atis (of L’Oreal’s Women of Color Lab), Sicardi puts a face to the workers whose suffering is overlooked in the name of globalized commercial efficiency — and a name to those in the industry both perpetuating its violence and trying to solve its thorny problems.
In sharp contrast to the previous chapter filled with the accounts of unnamed workers, Sicardi turns their attention to one of beauty’s most recognizable names: Coco Chanel. Despite the House of Chanel’s best efforts at suppression, the designer’s collaboration with the Nazis has become well known in recent years, complicating her legacy in fashion and beauty. Still, Chanel No. 5 remains one of the most popular perfumes in the world. Despite what little I already knew of Chanel’s biography, I didn’t expect to learn about the Wertheimers, the Jewish family who became responsible for producing and manufacturing the fragrance, inadvertently helping to sustain Chanel’s lavish Parisian lifestyle during World War II. Nor about how quickly Chanel began to associate herself with the Nazis to maintain her wealth and prestige. Sicardi confronts how her selfishness and hatred helped her not only survive, but thrive, in Nazi-occupied France. Behind the iconic fragrance, Sicardi locates a monstrous history of greed. “And it makes sense, really,” they write, “because power appears beautiful, and beauty makes time feel conquerable. Beauty makes cruel choices so easy. Beauty makes empathy a political tool.”
Of course, beauty is more than just the products we use or the ideas of how our bodies should look. It’s a history and culture shaped over generations by economies, geopolitics, conflict, and the movement of commodities and people. Sicardi chooses to explore beauty’s connective tissue first through hair, then through the nail industry. Through hair, Sicardi wrestles with how styles and textures have signified resistance, forced assimilation, opportunities for entrepreneurship, and materials for self-empowerment. Biographies of Haitian-American barber Pierre Toussaint and activist business mogul Madam C.J. Walker intersect with the violent cutting of Chinese men’s queue braids in San Francisco jails as part of the Pigtail Ordinance of 1878; the rise of South Korea’s wig industry in the 20th century, fueled by U.S. embargoes after the Vietnam War; and the emergence of synthetic extensions and hairpieces. By following each strand of this braid, Sicardi untangles the politics that underpin our beauty supply stores and hair salons. Through manicures, Sicardi wrestles with the complicated legacy of actress Tippi Hedren, credited with building America’s nail industry by offering training to Vietnamese refugees. Billed as an opportunity for the disenfranchised, Sicardi unpacks the racism, classism, and exploitation these manicurists experienced: “The reality of a miracle is that it is also a story of devastation.” Yet there are also opportunities for solidarity, such as the founding of Mantrap, a Black- and Vietnamese-owned salon, in the 1980s, or collective organizing by cooperatives like the New York Nail Salon Workers Association and the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative. Sicardi describes learning how to care for their hair and do their own nails as part of this journey, carrying on these living histories through the work of their own hands rather than merely being a passive consumer.
Only Sicardi could write a book about beauty as incisive and thoughtful as this one. They are, after all, a veteran of the very industry they set out to critique. Perhaps their name rings a bell from their Rookie Mag days. You’ve probably clicked on one of their articles for publications like Allure, Teen Vogue, The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, or The Verge. In 2015, Sicardi made headlines when they resigned from their role as Buzzfeed’s beauty editor following the censorship of an article criticizing a misogynistic ad by one of the site’s advertisers, Dove. In the introduction, Sicardi recounts how that moment shaped their perspective as a critic: “It is hard to live under the specter of what bodies are supposed to be. It gets even more complicated when you are getting paid to articulate those rules — when your job is to give voice to the rules at the same time that you have to make it seem like you’re pushing against them.” Today, Sicardi continues to carve out their own space in beauty, offering their services as a brand consultant and as a judge for the Art and Olfaction Awards. In 2022, they founded the nail art culture nonprofit, the Museum of Nails Foundation — a fitting evolution of their activism, given how they write in the book about the empowerment and precarity of the nail industry. As a tastemaker, critic, journalist, consumer, and self-described “beauty world builder,” Sicardi has built their career on negotiating beauty’s complex networks of power. The House of Beauty isn’t just a call to expose the industry’s harms to themselves and others; it’s a call for readers to learn, resist, and advance positive change.
The House of Beauty begs the question, “What’s the state of beauty criticism today?” It’s a thought I kept pondering as I made my way through the book. Like many twenty-somethings today, my formative understanding of beauty was shaped first by magazines, then the meteoric rise of beauty YouTubers, Instagram influencers, and TikTokers. It’s hard not to drown in a sea of whitewashed sponsored content, shady brand deals, and profit-motivated recommendations. Sicardi is one of the few beauty creatives who continues to challenge the status quo, drawing attention to companies’ bad behavior while also providing much-needed education on how our culture of beauty and wellness today is shaped by political histories of race, class, immigration, disability, gender, and sexual identity. The House of Beauty’s hybrid intervention situates Sicardi among fellow critics like Fariha Róisín, Sable Yong, Tanaïs, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Moshtari Hilal, Chloe Cooper Jones, and Ellen Atlanta, who coalesce their lived experiences into the industry’s systemic injustices.
As much as Sicardi’s book is concerned with the past and present of the beauty industry, The House of Beauty also looks to its future. Sicardi wrestles with how beauty’s production actively contributes to the climate crisis: through the harvesting of natural resources, the waste produced by packaging, and polluting emissions; its use of fossil-fuel by-products; and companies’ push to displace Indigenous peoples from their homelands. They unpack how greenwashing buzzwords like “clean,” “organic,” and “sustainable” aren’t enough to address the industry’s systemic issues with extraction and over-consumption. When they visit a conference for bodyhackers and transhumanities, Sicardi identifies body modification technology as the beauty industry’s sinister new frontier. Obsessions with self-enhancement and optimized perfection find institutional support from tech companies, the military, and universities. Yet these futures of beauty hardly acknowledge the cost, feeding into the capitalist drive for continuous growth while overlooking the harms that such technologies and ideas have on the disabled, working class, and communities of color. In a chapter about activists mobilizing to distribute hygiene kits in places like Los Angeles’s Skid Row during COVID lockdown, community hygiene during police brutality protests, and the precarity of beauty store and salon closures, Sicardi finds a way to turn these daily anxieties into a roadmap of new possibilities. “Beauty as an ethical act means understanding you have the duty to use it responsibly,” they write, “We are given imperfect choices. We must force better ones.”
Through The House of Beauty, Arabelle Sicardi holds up a mirror to the beauty industry, inviting us to look, listen, and learn about this world that has shaped how we perceive ourselves — even if we don’t like the ugliness we see. Beauty becomes a method, a tool, a weapon, a bridge, a form of survival, a guide through which we can understand the world, an archive of deeply personal and expansively global histories. Sicardi confronts beauty’s behemoths, from individuals like Coco Chanel to the multinational corporations monopolizing the industry, but also makes sure to recognize the life and legacy of industry heroes whose stories are overlooked and whose contributions remain underappreciated.
A project that was years in the making, I found myself craving more and reflecting on what I felt to be missing: further teasing out of the linkages between the beauty industry and the military industrial complex, deeper explorations of beauty’s historical intersections with disability, how beauty has functioned in queer communities as forms of self-affirmation and political resistance. The House of Beauty is a comprehensive guide, yes, but it also reads as an invitation for others in the industry take Sicardi’s kit off the vanity counter and learn more for themselves. “When the world tells you beauty is not your bounty, not your legacy, not your place, not your home, when the world tells you that you are not deserving of care,” they instruct us: “Don’t believe it. Write yourself in.” The work of understanding beauty—its mechanisms, its materialities, its evolutions, its trend cycles, its capacities for world making, knowing, and undoing—is never finished.
In 2026, the stakes of Sicardi’s project feel more urgent than ever. The House of Beauty ends with a section titled “Heart Chest,” a collection of resources highlighting organizations that provide services like hygiene for unhoused communities, gender-affirming care, financially-accessible bodywork, wellness support for chronically ill and disabled people, beauty industry worker advocacy, and climate justice activism. For all of the ways beauty hurts us, Sicardi shows how its rituals, skills, and products can help us care for each other and ourselves in times of crisis. As they put it, “I am crawling my way out of the rubble with very manicured hands.” 🌀
Eleonor Botoman is an art historian and culture critic based in Brooklyn. They are currently a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center studying environmental art, material culture, and design. When they’re not experimenting with perfumery, you can find them curating multimedia wonders for their Substack newsletter, Screenshot Reliquary.