I will read anything the brilliant, unfailingly perceptive, and multitudes-containing Arabelle Sicardi puts into the world. Now their first book is finally here, and hallelujah! The House of Beauty is scintillating, a trove of wisdom and insight.--R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit

The House of Beauty attends to the multiple dimensions of the beauty industry, including its labors, injuries, hopes, and promises. This dazzling study is wrought through Arabelle Sicardi's conviction that beauty matters deeply, because it is a balm, because it is a war, because it is a factory, because it is a glimpse of another way of being with one another.--Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of The Promise of Beauty

Incisive and sweeping, analytical yet deeply personal. Arabelle Sicardi asks us to see beauty not only as systemic, imperial violence, profane on an environmental and human scale, but also as an insurrection, a defiant act of personal care and healing. A glorious treatise on everybody's problematic fave.--Mary H.K. Choi, New York Times best-selling author of Yolk

The House of Beauty is an example of Arabelle Sicardi's profound ability to understand the many different ways we are interconnected and thus culpable for how we consume, participate in, and self-care in alignment with beauty standards in the capitalist confines of the Global North.--Fariha Róisín, author of Who Is Wellness For?

I have always respected how Arabelle Sicardi has forensically uncovered Beauty's checkered past and present without ever once eschewing compassion and devotion for the community and connection formed through Beauty. There is no better voice I trust to take us through the worst of its history so that we can envision a brighter future.--Sable Yong, author of Die Hot with a Vengeance

A panoramic must-read to understand one of the most powerful (but too often dismissed) social forces of our times.--Elise Hu, author of Flawless and cohost of Forever35

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2026-10-20

Length: 288 pages