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
optimize 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.