Emotions, Bodies, and Identities in the Hair and Beauty Salon
Caring Beyond Skin Deep
Emotions, Bodies, and Identities in the Hair and Beauty Salon
Caring Beyond Skin Deep
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Description
Hair and beauty salons are a common feature of daily life, with salons seemingly on every street corner. What are we to make of this demand? Drawing on ethnographic and other methods, Emotions, Bodies, and Identities in the Hair and Beauty Salon suggests that salons are about more than just simply maintaining appearances. This book argues that salons are about care work, which involves responding to emotions through talk, managing bodies through touch, and curating identities through aesthetics. While feminists have long identified the impositions of ideals pushed by the beauty industry, there has been less attention to generative aspects of beauty culture. This book tries to put the care involved in salon work on the radar, examining how workers manage talk and their therapeutic-like roles, touch and physical intimacy, and identities via the curation of surfaces in the salon. In a context where visits to salons are often described by clients as “self-care”, this book is a reminder that someone else is often doing the work. This book highlights how salon workers provide clients with care that is often profoundly meaningful in terms of responding to emotions, bodies, and identities, and that this is indeed labour that ought to be valued and supported accordingly.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction – Why Care Beyond Skin Deep?
1. Chapter One – Theory: The Impasse in Debating Beauty
2. Chapter Two – Real Life: Trying to Put Care on the Radar
3. Chapter Three – Representation: The Fictional Salon
4. Chapter Four – Emotions: Talk, Therapy, and Friendship in the Salon
5. Chapter Five – Bodies: Managing Touch and Physical Intimacy in the Salon
6. Chapter Six – Identities: Aesthetic Desires and Curating Surfaces in the Salon
7. Chapter Seven – Money: The Business of Salons Versus Authentic Care
Conclusion – Caring in a Time of Crisis
Bibliography
Product details
| Published | 08 Jan 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 272 |
| ISBN | 9781666945836 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 9 b/w |
| Dimensions | 229 x 152 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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