Handbook of Beauty and Inequality

This open access handbook offers a state-of-the-art overview of theoretical perspectives, empirical insights and scholarly debates into the relationship between beauty and inequality: how does beauty shape and reproduce social inequalities, and how does social inequality shape appearance and beauty standards? This comprehensive review emerges out of the burgeoning research on appearance and inequality in recent years. The handbook brings together under one volume the widely dispersed research on this topic which uses different concepts, approaches and methods, often without reference to one another. It does so by pulling together knowledge on appearance and inequality from different subfields of sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy, management studies, communication and media studies, economics, legal studies, gerontology, psychology and evolutionary psychology, and creates talking points between and within disciplines. It presents different conceptualizations of beauty, including beauty as morality, capital, stigma, asset, merit and fashion. It also focuses on mechanisms linking beauty to inequality, drawing mainly on quantitative and analytical approaches, and looks at intersections between beauty and various axes of inequality. Finally, the work highlights institutional approaches to various fields in which beauty standards are created and reproduced. The chapters are written by established scholars from a range of disciplines and countries and discuss the literature, while also presenting original empirical research. This is a highly useful and handy resource for anyone interested in learning more about the field.

This exemplary and ambitious Handbook of Beauty and Inequality is a timely contribution to our understanding of how beauty operates in our social world. The introduction offers a sharp analytical framework to organize what is a multi-layered interdisciplinary field, while the contributions carefully parse how beauty shapes inequality in fields of activity ranging from teaching, to politics and fashion. This book is certain to become a classic reference for everyone intrigued by the power of beauty.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         -  Michèle Lamont, Harvard University

Beauty has emerged in recent years as a key arena for social scientists interested in inequality. This invaluable volume brings together cutting-edge thinkers from different disciplines to think about the myriad ways beauty is related to various forms of advantage and exclusion in contemporary societies.  Timely, comprehensive, and asking important, provocative questions, this volume demonstrates that beauty and inequality represents a distinct and urgent field of emerging social science research. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            -  Sam Friedman, The London School of Economics and Political Science

 Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but vision is socially structured along quite unequal lines. This original, timely and rich handbook looks at the intersection of beauty and social inequality and compiles a wealth of interdisciplinary research into how beauty both creates, maintains and sometimes capsizes inequality.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                -   Roberta Sassatelli, University of Bologna

Giselinde Kuipers is a Research Professor of Sociology at the KU Leuven in Leuven, Belgium. She is a pioneer of research on beauty and inequality, and has expertise in cultural and media sociology, visual methods and mixed-methods designs. Her innovative ERC-funded mixed-methods project on the sociology of beauty and inequality was one of the first sociological studies on the topic. In 2022, she received her second ERC grant for her project Beauty and Inequality: Physical Appearance, Symbolic Boundaries and Social Dis/advantage in Five Global Cities. She has published extensively on beauty and inequality. She has also served as editor-in-chief for scientific journals and co-edited edited volumes, including the Handbook of Humour Studies.

Outi Sarpila is a Senior Research Fellow at INVEST Research Flagship Centre, University of Turku, Finland. Sarpila’s areas of expertise include physical appearance-based social inequalities, economic sociology, and quantitative research. She has led two national research projects related to physical appearance and inequalities. She has published widely on the topic both in Finnish and English. She is a co-author of the book Ulkonäköyhteiskunta [Appearance society] which was nominated for the Scientific Book of the Year 2019 in Finland. From 2019 to 2023 she served as a co-editor-in-chief of the Finnish Journal of Social Research, and in 2021 she co-edited the book Appearance as Capital.