" Beauty in a Box is a magnificent body of work that centers the hidden history of black Canadian beauty culture in relationship to advertising, retail establishments, and women's magazines. By including black Canadian women within the visual culture of modernity, Cheryl Thompson rejects the erasure of black female Canadian bodies from representations of beauty and consumerism in Canada. In addition, as a brilliantly pioneering examination of how African American beauty culture shaped black Canada, Thompson fills an important gap in research on global black beauty culture. Beauty in a Box stands as one of the most captivating and well-researched tomes to examine black beauty culture in Canada and transnationally. Read this book!" - Ingrid Banks, University of California Santa Barbara " Beauty in a Box makes a critical contribution to the history of beauty in Canada. One of the first studies to focus exclusively on Black women's beauty in twentieth-century Canada, it is a wide-ranging, ambitious recuperative work that adds significantly to our knowledge of a Black beauty culture deeply rooted in Canada.[The book] lays a firm foundation for future work on beauty, the body, and race." - Jane Nicholas, Canadian Journal of History 56.
1, 2021.