Beauty Design : Cosmetics as Intention & Conception

Text in English & German. Cosmetically-enhanced beauty is something that has existed for decades. Over the course of the last century, however, a cosmetics industry has arisen that is worth millions. Its products claim to optimise visual appearance, to bestow inner and outer health and to delay aging, under a veneer of medical credibility and reliable results. Cosmetics deals in alleged ''deep-acting'' substances, which are supposed to detoxify and to purify the body from within. However, the whole arsenal of cosmetic ingredients is founded more on persuasion than conviction. Cosmetics is always a matter of mimicking an ideal. To this extent, cosmetic discourse deals in what might be described as an iconography of hunger -- it requires and is predicated upon a feeling of lack. At the same time, it promises to remedy that lack. The referential frame for cosmetics is constituted by cultural history and iconology, by semiotics and sociology, by psychology and rhetoric. Like fashion, it has called into being a linguistic system of considerable depth and complexity; one that draws its subtexts from futurology and history, from medicine and alchemy, from nostalgia and from heritage preservation. Cosmetics are supposed to make one more attractive and more seductive -- to make one positively irresistible, in fact. Cosmetics hold out the prospect of sexiness to women and men alike. All that one has to do is to acquire the right creams and lotions, the right palette of powders and rouges, of lipsticks and mascara, and one has a form of beauty that can be bought! The persuasive power of cosmetics is as dominant as it is irresistible. All of us could resist it if we wished to. And yet we don''t wish to. This book exposes the rhetorical system behind the promises of cosmetics in terms of the histories of cultures and of mentalities, analysing the verbal/visual messages of selected examples. The internationally known architecture and design historian Volker Fischer was deputy director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main for over ten years. Since 1995 he has built up a new design department in the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt; in addition to his museum work he teaches history of architecture and design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach. Volker Fischer is already represented in Edition Axel Menges by books on Stefan Wewerka, Richard Meier, the Commerzbank in Frankfurt by Norman Foster, Hall 3 of Messe Frankfurt am Main by Nicholas Grimshaw, and the design activities of Lufthansa.