Beauty & Fashion Books - Page 2

Survey Of Historic Costume: A History Of Western Dress

Phyllis G. Tortora, Keith Eubank

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Boring with Confusing Pictures 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 4 people found this review helpful.

There are some real photos of paintings from the time periods, but also a lot of drawings of tiny cartoon people wearing time period clothing which are confusing. The author could have at least made the drawings bigger and drawn arrows naming each piece of the outfit, but under many pictures the caption just reads "women's attire" which leaves the student forced to read through the entire chapter and match up the cartoon character's garments to the clothing descriptions. It takes longer to learn and study for tests and is often confusing. I wouldn't reccomend this book! If your costume teacher has a PHD please let them know it is their duty to write a new history of costume book!!!

Good book with a few drawbacks 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book is often used as a textbook in costume history courses. As far as textbooks go, it is definitely one of the best. The text is quite dense, since it covers a lot of material in a limited space. Despite this, it is never dull. The authors are always careful to cite their sources, as well as explain why they support one point of view over others in those instances where several conflicting opinions exist. The text has several very useful features: extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter, as well as at the end of the book, are an excellent resource guide for more in-depth study; the visual summary tables at the end of each chapter review the basic progression of the silhouette within a period; and every chapter includes a section titled "Contemporary comments", which shows what the people who actually wore these garments thought about them. The careful attention the authors pay to the general historical, cultural, and political backgrounds of each period present fashion history as part of the greater framework of the history of Western society, which makes for an engaging read.

I stopped short of giving this text a 5-star rating for the following reasons:
1. Illustrations in the body of the text, primary research as well as drawings, are black and white. Color illustrations are confined to separate pages inserted in the middle of the book. The plates are too few and too small, and the color fidelity doesn't seem to be of exceptional quality. It seems that in an effort to keep costs down, the publisher sacrificed a vital part of the book. After all, when it comes to clothes, a picture often is worth a thousand words.
2. Whoever was in charge of making sure that the illustration and page numbers correspond to the ones cited, did an extremely poor job. What I mean is, when authors describe a particular garment, they'll refer to an illustration in parenthesis (see figure 8.10, page 182). Well, this illustration may or may not be on the page named, as well as the illustration may or may not be an example of what the authors are talking about. The correct illustration is never far (usually on the same page or the next page), and I have not yet encountered an instance where a cited illustration is absent entirely, but this discrepancy has occurred once or twice in almost every chapter. I place the full responsibility on the publishers, and would ask them in the future to be more careful when proofreading an expensive and otherwise admirable text.

Bottom line: buy this book if you intend to read it. If you are looking for a quick and clear visual reference of costumes through the ages, your money will be better spent elsewhere. Try The Complete History of Costume & Fashion: From Ancient Egypt to the Present Day

Don't Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me, 7th Edition

Paula Begoun, Bryan Barron

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 324 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Women spend an extraordinary amount of money on cosmetics--$45 billion a year in the U.S. alone. Now in its fourth edition, Don't Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me strikes fear in cosmetics-counter consultants everywhere. First off, Begoun has deconstructed ingredient lists. Ever wonder what methylparaben, propylparaben, and butylparaben are doing in your mascara? And what is diazolidinyl urea? All four are potential irritants, and the latter is a preservative that can release formaldehyde, a class A carcinogen. Buyer beware.

Begoun also lists which companies are cruelty-free and which continue to conduct animal testing. The majority of the book--and that's nearly 800 pages--is devoted to reviews of thousands of cosmetics, from cleansers, foundations, alpha-hydroxy acids, and moisturizers to lip liners, eye shadows, and concealers, all of which Begoun has personally tested. (There are no hair care products listed, as that warrants another book entirely: Don't Go Shopping for Hair Care Products Without Me.)

She's perfectly frank and tells it like it is. (On Revlon's ColorStay Makeup: "goes far beyond the claim of 'It won't come off on him.' It won't come off when you want it to.") You'll learn how to tell when you're being boondoggled by a salesperson, what's overpriced and overhyped, as well as what's overlooked. More than 200 brands are included, along with a helpful summary at the end that lists the best products for each cosmetic category. It should be noted that not only is Begoun a fine consumer advocate, she's also a self-esteem advocate: she mentions time and again that even the best cosmetics won't necessarily improve your life, and that's a point well taken.

Looking Younger: Makeovers That Make You Look as Young as You Feel

Robert Jones

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Editorial Review:

Robert JonesGÇÖs tips are very practical and accessible.

Looking Younger, a follow-up to Robert JonesGÇÖs successful Makeup Makeovers and Makeup Makeovers: Weddings, provides unique techniques for taking the years off and looking stunning at any age. Readers learn how to expertly cover and camouflage wrinkles, sagging eyelids, and dull skintones while practical and easy tips help them customize their makeup application to play up their best features and minimize their worst.

They'll learn which colors and makeup techniques add a decade to the face-and how to turn back the clock in a few well-chosen steps. Whether it's a glamorous look for a special event or an everyday makeup routine, readers will learn how to look attractive and natural, not made up and artificial. Techniques are illustrated with 150 before-and-after photos that will inspire and educate readers on how to look their most beautiful.

Dress Your Best: The Complete Guide to Finding the Style That's Right for Your Body

Clinton Kelly, Stacy London

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 106 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The 8 million fans of TLC’s hottest show, What Not to Wear, know it as the place to go for real-life fashion advice. Now the show’s hosts, Clinton Kelly and Stacy London, offer spot-on fashion wisdom—with an attitude—in this fully illustrated, authoritative, and irreverent fashion guide to dressing your best for every occasion. Clinton and Stacy’s surefire method for boosting appearance rests on their belief that we can all win admiring glances by selecting clothes that play up our positives and create a balanced body shape. In Dress Your Best, Clinton and Stacy match a wide range of female and male body types with the perfect work, casual, and evening attire, showing you exactly how to make your best parts “work” for you.

Dressing tips for 26 body types!
Features 18 women and 8 men: bigger on top, bigger on bottom, a little extra in the middle, not curvy, extra curvy, small-framed, athletic, and more!

Whether you’re searching for a way to accentuate your assets, puzzling over the right print pattern for your frame, or just looking for a solution to the dilemma “What do I need to wear to look fabulous?” you’ll find here the universal tips, dos and don’ts, seasonal alternatives, and must-haves that will deliver the answers. Dress Your Best is certain to become the standard by which all other fashion guides are measured.

Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion

Alan Flusser

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Dressing the Man is the definitive guide to what men need to know in order to dress well and look stylish without becoming fashion victims.

Alan Flusser's name is synonymous with taste and style. With his new book, he combines his encyclopedic knowledge of men's clothes with his signature wit and elegance to address the fundamental paradox of modern men's fashion: Why, after men today have spent more money on clothes than in any other period of history, are there fewer well-dressed men than at any time ever before?

According to Flusser, dressing well is not all that difficult, the real challenge lies in being able to acquire the right personalized instruction. Dressing well pivots on two pillars -- proportion and color. Flusser believes that "Permanent Fashionability," both his promise and goal for the reader, starts by being accountable to a personal set of physical trademarks and not to any kind of random, seasonally served-up collection of fashion flashes.

Unlike fashion, which is obliged to change each season, the face's shape, the neck's height, the shoulder's width, the arm's length, the torso's structure, and the foot's size remain fairly constant over time. Once a man learns how to adapt the fundamentals of permanent fashion to his physique and complexion, he's halfway home.

Taking the reader through each major clothing classification step-by-step, this user-friendly guide helps you apply your own specifics to a series of dressing options, from business casual and formalwear to pattern-on-pattern coordination, or how to choose the most flattering clothing silhouette for your body type and shirt collar for your face.

A man's physical traits represent his individual road map, and the quickest route toward forging an enduring style of dress is through exposure to the legendary practitioners of this rare masculine art. Flusser has assembled the largest andmost diverse collection of stylishly mantled men ever found in one book. Many never-before-seen vintage photographs from the era of Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, and Fred Astaire are employed to help illustrate the range and diversity of authentic men's fashion. Dressing the Man's sheer magnitude of options will enable the reader to expand both the grammar and verbiage of his permanent-fashion vocabulary.

For those men hoping to find sartorial fulfillment somewhere down the road, tethering their journey to the mind-set of permanent fashion will deliver them earlier rather than later in life.

Shop Your Closet: The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your Closet with Style

Melanie Charlton Fascitelli

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Just when you feared your overstuffed, eyesore of a closet was a lost cause, here's the antidote to all your closet woes. Closet expert and style maven Melanie Charlton Fascitelli is here to help you whip your closet into shape, refreshing your wardrobe and saving you time along the way.

With this accessible, stylish guide, you'll find out how to redo your closet and organize your clothes so that you can, yes, go shopping there—sort through shirts, pants, skirts, dresses, scarves, and shoes, all in perfect condition and ready to go.

From the first closet face-off to long-term maintenance, Charlton Fascitelli takes you step by step through the entire process of turning your closet into a "safe haven" for your clothes.

Learn how to:

Face your inner packrat and clean out your closet

Shop for and pick items that flatter your body

Craft the best wardrobe for your lifestyle

Create space in your closet by reworking it logistically

Store your clothes and shoes so they last longer

Charlton Fascitelli also covers consigning or donating all your old stuff; keeping your closet clean and tidy; packing smartly and efficiently; storing your linens; and organizing other areas of your home, including your medicine cabinet, pantry, or CD collection.

Clearing clutter, organizing clothes, and remaking your wardrobe has never been so easy or attainable. Shop Your Closet is your go-to source for closet nirvana.

Makeup Makeovers: Expert Secrets for Stunning Transformations

Robert Jones

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 69 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Satisfied yet puzzled... 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I just bought this book today, having looked at most of the pages at the bookstore. I love his suggestion about the basic color palette needed to create depths and midtones and highlights for the eye area - given on page 63. There are 13 shades all in the ranges of beige-brown-pink-orange group so it is all about playing with gradual tones working with your skin; no blues, purples, greens etc. which always come and go with trends and seasons basically!

I do love the contouring techniques that are consistent throughout the book - on all the various face shapes, hair colors, eye colors and shapes. I do believe that these subtle shading and contouring techniques are what separates normal everyday faces from the Hollywood divas!

I have two problems though however with the presentation of the book.
1. The images look like they have been digitally enhanced here and there with something like Photoshop SmartBlur. It MAY be that Mr.Jones's technique of contouring is so subtle and perfect that the skin looks like cheese(flawless, smoothed out), or maybe it's the specific lighting they've used - but something about the skin just looks so fake!

It's even more apparent since the before pictures look like they have been taken under a colder lighting with white backgrounds, and the enhanced pictures look like they have at least 3 different lighting sources to give that professional glow with a gradually varying tonal background that makes the faces pop out from the page, and also the hair is done to perfection also. So although the makeup he uses in the book DO enhance the faces, it's all these other little sneaky things that make the Before/After pictures look all the more disparate.

2. A lot of the contouring done seems to have that orange glow - and although they look good on flat paper with all the correct studio lighting and background that flatter the faces, I'm not so sure how these faces will ACTUALLY look in an average life setting. Will they look overly done, too orange, too barbie like, air-brushed like some 80s painting???

Anyway, those are my two complaints or doubts if you like. But I do appreciate a lot of the things shared in this book - the photos ARE quite amazing and beautiful. The colors do inspire me, I love the sensitivity of the subtle changes and variations and gradations Mr. Jones applied to the faces. They are quite picture perfect...

The explanations he gives are really sound visual advices I'd say. I've bought many books regarding makeup, I've taken some professional one-on-one classes with a Korean makeup artist who does a lot of top Korean actresses/models here, and yet, there are things I'd love to try out following the advice given here. I'd like to see how much all of these seductive illustrative images will do for my own face!!!

I just checked out his website too - and realized he had a DVD. I wish I had known that he had these before I bought this book though. It seems like the images in this book may have been recycled though; I saw that there was another book featuring the same photos with MORE detailed color chart with numbered steps on shading, which I'm a little disheartened about. So check out ALL his books before you settle on one!!!

OK. Just my two cents.

Editorial Review:

Forget extreme makeovers! Robert Jones, makeup artist extraordinaire, outlines step-by-step how even the ugliest duckling can become a swan-with makeup alone! In hundreds of awe-inspiring before-and-after photos, Robert makes it easy for any woman to achieve true beauty.

Unlike most makeup books that focus on celebrities or the already-glamorous, Makeup Makeovers shows every woman how to be her most beautiful. No matter what your age, skin tone, or profile, Robert can show you simple techniques that camouflage flaws and highlight each woman's unique beauty.

Best of all, it's EASY! Even if you've never worn makeup before, you can learn how to bring out your best in just a few minutes.

Organic Body Care Recipes

Stephanie Tourles

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Radiantly healthy skin, hair, feet, hands, eyes, and nails. Commercial beauty products make this promise every day and live up to it with varying degrees of success. Stephanie Tourles offers a better solution to everyone frustrated with the endless cycle of expensive, synthetic, famous-name cosmetics that often fall short of expectations. Take control of beauty treatments with homemade products that use safe, nourishing ingredients to pamper the body and soothe the senses.

Tourles, a licensed esthetician, herbalist, and aromatherapist, has developed 175 recipes that are fun, simple, and immensely satisfying to make in home kitchens. Her natural beauty treatments deliver the results promised by department store brands — skin, hair, and nails that glow with vitality and inner wellness. Lotions, scrubs, toners, balms, and masks polish and balance the skin, soothe current problems, and prevent future ones. Shampoos, rinses, and conditioners tone the scalp, boost highlights, and leave hair soft and shiny. The book's whole-body coverage also includes recipes for hand and footcare, nail treatments, shaving cream, and even popular spa treatments such as microdermabrasion exfoliants, detox and cellulite soaks, ayurvedic oils, and herbal cold salves. Most important, there is never any doubt about the purity of these ingredients!

Each formula is clearly presented in recipe style, with notes on prep time, storage, and uses. Many products can be customized according to personal needs, whim, or mood, and they all use readily available, natural ingredients. Organic Body Care Recipes is a natural treasure for every body.

Making Faces

Kevyn Aucoin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 213 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Making Faces, Kevyn Aucoin, North Americas preeminent makeup artist, shares his secrets, explaining not only the basics of makeup application and technique but also how to use those fundamentals (sometimes in unconventional ways) to create a wide range of different looks. Making Faces features step-by-step directions, instructional full-colour sketches, and a gallery of noncelebrity transformations, as well as fabulous images of stars and supermodels as youve never seen them before.Lush and enticing, Making Faces satisfies on many levels: extraordinary photography, surprising makeup looks on A-list celebrities (Julia Roberts, Demi Moore, Courtney Love), and recipes for doing it yourself. Mirabella Kevyn Aucoins new beauty bible is the Genesis, Chronicles, and Revelations of makeup. Allure Kevie isnt a makeup man, hes a magician. He creates an atmosphere of beauty mixed with magic. Cher Kevyns progression of work over the years has elevated makeup to an art form. Tina Turner Kevyn enables each and every one of us to play the character we want to play, be the person we want to be, and most important, feel the best that we can feel about ourselves. Drew Barrymore

Perfumes: The Guide

Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The first book of its kind: a definitive guide to the world of perfume

Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez are experts in the world of scent. Turin, a renowned scientist, and Sanchez, a longtime perfume critic, have spent years sniffing the world's most elegant and beautiful--as well as some truly terrible--perfumes. In Perfumes: The Guide, they combine their talents and experience to review more than twelve hundred fragrances, separating the divine from the good from the monumentally awful. Through witty, irreverent, and illuminating prose, the reviews in Perfumes not only provide consumers with an essential guide to shopping for fragrance, but also make for a unique reading experience.

Perfumes features introductions to women's and men's fragrances and an informative "frequently asked questions" section including:
• What is the difference between eau de toilette and perfume?
• How long can I keep perfume before it goes bad?
• What's better: splash bottles or spray atomizers?
• What are perfumes made of?
• Should I change my fragrance each season?

Perfumes: The Guide is an authoritative, one-of-a-kind book that will do for fragrance what Robert Parker's books have done for wine. Beautifully designed and elegantly illustrated, this book will be the perfect gift for collectors and anyone who's ever had an interest in the fascinating subject of perfume.

Picking a Perfect Perfume

For Perfumes: The Guide, Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez tested nearly 1,500 fragrances--some glorious, some foul. Here they offer some humble advice on finding something worth loving among the stinkers.

1. Smell top to bottom
Perfumes usually unfold in three (often very different) stages: the sparkling first few minutes are the fragrance's top note, followed by its true personality, known as the heart note, and ending with the base note, aka the drydown, hours later. Something you love at the counter you may loathe by the parking lot. We recommend top-to-bottom tests on skin and on paper, since some scents that disappoint on the heat of skin may shine on your shirtsleeve.

2. Write it down
Bring a pen to write names on paper test strips, so you're not in anguish hours later, trying to recall which is the third scent from the left that transports you to Shangri-La. Keep a cheap, possibly extremely trashy paperback on hand, so you can store strips between pages to keep them separate.

3. Rest your nose
Noses tune out, which is why you can smell your friends' homes but not your own. Smell no more than five scents per day on paper strips and try on only the best one or two, to keep your nose reliable.

4. Check the radiance
To get a good sense of how the perfume will smell to other people as you walk past, try spraying a test strip and leaving it in the room while you step out for a bit. Come back fifteen minutes later and breathe in: that's the radiance.