The Beauty of Color: The Ultimate Beauty Guide for Skin of Color (Hardcover)

by Iman (Author)
Key Phrases: bottom lashline, top lashline, lower lashline, Usual Makeup Look, Get the Look Apply, Middle Eastern (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Discovered when she was a university student in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1975 by photographer Peter Beard, Iman went on to become an international supermodel. To address the needs of women of color, she launched a line of cosmetics, Iman, in 1994, and with this beautifully illustrated coffee-table book geared to black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Asian women, and timed to coincide with the debut of her second cosmetic line, she's poised to become the voice of beauty for this underrepresented group of women. In a conversational tone, Iman shares solutions to basic makeup and skin care quandaries (how to use blush, test foundation and choose tools) and debunks myths (dark skinned women don't need sunblock, ethnicity determines skin color). Other sections show how to "get the look" from "Ghetto Fab" to "So Fresh So Clean." Gorgeous photographs of well-known faces (Salma Hayek, Tyra Banks, Ling) with personal tidbits of advice and real women makeovers, from teens to women over 50, round out the offerings. Fun and flirty, with a confidential, insider feel, this combination of celebrity and self-improvement, capped with artistic portraits of women famous and not, indicate another success for Iman.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description
From the beloved fashion icon and cosmetics entrepreneur, the first book to embrace global beauty and women of all ethnicities.

Few faces are as instantly recognizable as that of Iman's. She's been a groundbreaking supermodel for the world's top designers and a muse for photographers, and she is the founder of the world's most popular cosmetic brand for skin of color.

Now, in an era when the face of beauty has changed-and the most celebrated women in Hollywood include such stars as Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, and Lucy Liu-Iman delivers a new approach to makeup and skin care. With The Beauty of Color, she revolutionizes the way women of color can think about the way they look and feel. Iman resists categorizing people according to ethnicity, and instead embraces the whole range of skin color-light to dark. This is the first beauty and makeup book to truly address skin tones across the spectrum-Latina, Black, Asian, Indian, Native American, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, as well as women of mixed ethnicities.

Inspired by her two illustrious careers-first as a world-class supermodel and then as founder of two of the world's top cosmetics lines-Iman is uniquely aware of the difficulties women of color have always had with skin care and makeup. In The Beauty of Color, Iman teaches readers how to work with skin care regimens and palettes targeted to their exact skin tone and type.

With stunning color photographs and images on every page, the book itself is a work of beauty, featuring Salma Hayek, Tyra Banks, Venus and Serena Williams, and other celebrities, as well as ordinary women of all ages. Unique, informative, and creative, The Beauty of Color is not only the first book to show women of every shade how to look their very best, but is also a landmark celebration of global beauty.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult (October 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399153187
• ISBN-13: 978-0399153181
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #385,621 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The splendor of diversity, October 31, 2005

By	A reader (WY USA) - See all my reviews

Most beauty books seem to rehash the same ideas or showcase looks that can be created by anyone who is somewhat familiar with makeup. This book is refreshingly different, and how! An immense amount of thought and creativity has gone into putting this book together. Iman and her team have gone into great lengths to portray a wide variety of looks on a broad spectrum of women. The makeup is so artfully done that you could come up with your own ideas by putting together components of several looks.

Another plus about this book is that the author doesn't resort to a common book-bulking tactic used by many cosmetics mavens. Here you don't see layouts of bare-faced (or nearly so) women with inane captions like "look how beautiful she is with only eyeliner". I think many women look to beauty books to give us creative inspiration. If we looked good w/o any goop on our face, we'd know it by now, saved a lot of time and $$$ and not bothered with makeup books. "The Beauty of Color" really delivers the goods. Congratulations to Iman (and team!) for a job well done!

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy This Book. Instructive & Beautifully Illustrated., October 20, 2005

By	D. Jefferson (Maryland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is all around wonderful. Not only are the pictures beautiful, but the book is very informative. This book is not only for women of color (African American, Latina, Asian, Indian, etc.), it is for all women. Iman instructs readers on many issues pertaining to makeup application, color palette selection, and skincare. The book instructs the reader on how to obtain certain looks with makeup. For example, she shows readers how to obtain the natural look or the glamour girl look. She even shows readers how to obtain the vampy and ghetto fabulous looks. In addition, she instructs readers on how to select the correct foundation, blush and bronzer colors based on individual skin color. Furthermore, the book also discusses skin care issues. Its instructions on skincare are not one size fits all. It gives care instructions to those with oily, dry, combination, and normal skin. It even includes instructions on how to take care skin with hyperpigmentation.

The book is beautifully illustrated and contains a wealth of information on makeup. Regardless of your age, if you love makeup and want to apply it correctly, buy this book.

72 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, March 27, 2006

By	True Refinement (Colorado) - See all my reviews

I was anxious to get my hands on this book and wondered if I should just buy it online without seeing it first. I'm glad I didn't, because when I checked it out at the library, I was truly disappointed. More than just make-up application, I was looking forward to seeing a variety of models that accurately displayed the world's women. The book showed models of color but not in the variety of shades that each ethnicity comes in. For example, the Asian models were shown stereotypically with light beige skin. No brown, Southeast Asian models were represented from countries such as Cambodia, Burma, Indonesia or Thailand or if there were some that did they looked lighter than most of their countrymen. The same with Latinas. Some of the models that were listed as coming from Latin American countries such as Brazil, Puerto Rico or Mexico looked nothing like the majority of Latinos from those countries. One model that supposedly was from Brazil looked like a poster girl for the Aryan nation! Blond hair, blue eyes and all!

Iman simply used the same stereotypical representations of these races as other modeling agencies do: all Asian models must be light porcelain, Latina models must look white Spaniard, Native Americans/Indigenous usually aren't represented, Middle Eastern and Indian models must be medium to light. Do you not see a pattern? With the exception of models of African decent, practically all the models were "light" versions of their race. That is not reality and it certainly is not "global beauty." The book claimed to appeal to complexions from "nutmeg to cinnamon." I was infuriated when I saw a chart of models meant to represent various skin tones with the overwhelming majority looking more from olive oil to lemon zest than "nutmeg to cinnamon." If it weren't for the three drops of dark chocolate models thrown in as tokens, the chart would have been a complete lie - and it was a lie. Whether the racist modeling agency or Iman likes it or not, the majority of women (and people) in the world ARE BROWN. So why didn't Iman, who is a woman of color herself portray this reality? Why, after her graceful speeches of not categorizing women according to ethnicity and stating that each race has diversity of complexions, did she fail to display that fact? The excuse certainly isn't because she couldn't get hold of unique looking models, as Iman is an icon herself with loads of resources at her finger tips and aspiring beauties of the rejected "too exotic" class abound. Any model would consider it a privilege to work with her. Of course the one race that was accurately portrayed with an array of colors was the models of African decent, but maybe that was done right because Iman herself is African.

If the Beauty of Color was done correctly at least 80% of the models should have been various shades of brown (i.e. mahogany, coffee, dark & milk chocolate, cinnamon, caramel, toffee, etc) because that is the global color. Was Iman ashamed to show this? Does she think that brown is boring? Or was she indirectly appealing to white consumers who might flip through the book? So maybe the intention was to incorporate so called "Latina" models that might be mistaken as Europeans themselves to make white customers feel included. But if that was the purpose it would defeat the whole reason for making a book for "women with skin of color" in the first place! Don't white women have enough books tailored for them with nothing but them represented on the pages? It's beauty books with genuine women of color that are lacking. Don't get me wrong, besides this mistake the book is beautiful: with gorgeous photography, detailed makeup application instructions and creative cosmetic looks. Literally speaking the book is filled with bright, vibrant colors but the Beauty of Color would've been so much more beautiful if it had been filled with women with real skin of color.