832264
research-article2019
TSOXXX10.1177/0092055X19832264Teaching SociologyBook Reviews
Book Reviews
Renee Engeln
Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with
Appearance Hurts Girls and Women. New York:
HarperCollins, 2018. 383 pp. $16.99. ISBN-10:
0062469789; ISBN-13: 978-0062469786
Reviewed by: Cara Bergstrom-Lynch, Eastern
Connecticut State University, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0092055X19832264
Psychologist Renee Engeln’s Beauty Sick: How the
Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls
and Women addresses the roots of this phenomenon
and the consequences of living in a culture that
objectifies women. As I began reading, examples of
beauty sickness became apparent all around me—
from “fat talk” during an interaction at a doctor’s
office, to appearance monitoring of girls at an ele-
mentary school event, to the now-ubiquitous
“skinny arm pose” that Engeln identifies on social
media. Engeln studies this pervasive and pernicious
emphasis on beauty for girls and women in order to
push back against it and ultimately to enable women
and girls to, in her words, “turn away from the mir-
ror and toward the world” (p. 329).
Beauty Sick is separated into five main sections:
(1) defining and discussing beauty sickness, (2)
looking at what beauty sickness does to girls and
women, (3) exploring how the media feeds this
sickness, (4) highlighting how the current methods
of fighting beauty sickness are unsuccessful, and
(5) outlining effective ways to fight beauty sick-
ness. Citing a variety of sources, including findings
from her own research lab and other scholars’
work, in-depth interviews that she conducted with
21 girls and women (ranging in age from 7 to 58),
examples from the media, and anecdotes from her
own life and teaching experiences, Engeln defines
beauty sickness as “what happens when women’s
emotional energy gets so bound up with what they
see in the mirror that it becomes harder for them to
see other aspects of their lives” (p. 7).
The stories of one or two interviewees are high-
lighted in each chapter and frame Engeln’s argu-
ments throughout the book. We meet women like
Teaching Sociology
2019, Vol. 47(2) 157­–171
© American Sociological Association 2019
ts.sagepub.com
Gabrielle, who were taught from a young age that
beauty is a key to their “power” (though Engeln
questions whether passively being judged by others
can be seen as real power), and women like Sofia,
who were catcalled repeatedly by strangers and
faced negative emotional consequences as a result.
We meet high school and college students as well
as adult women who say that body shaming and
being objectified by others eventually leads to self-
objectification and spending a great deal of time
and money on these beauty practices that reflect
and promote beauty sickness. Engeln discusses the
influence of a range of media (from advertising and
television to Instagram and websites that offer
“fitspiration” and “thinspiration”). The sheer
cumulative impact of this accounting of beauty
sickness is powerful. It paints a stark picture of the
gendered dynamics of this cultural phenomenon.
Since Engeln documents how efforts to fight
beauty sickness (such as media literacy and advertis-
ing campaigns like Unilever’s Dove Campaign for
“Real Beauty”) have come up short, I suspect that
undergraduate readers of Beauty Sick will appreciate
that the final third of the book is dedicated to solu-
tions. The ideas are wide-ranging and rooted in
extensive research, particularly, psychological sur-
veys and laboratory studies. Some of the solutions
that Engeln describes include being “gentle with
yourself,” limiting exposure to beauty-focused
images, and focusing on what one’s body can do
rather than what it looks like. While these strategies
are meant to “turn the volume down” on beauty so
that attention can shift to other concerns, sociology
faculty and students will recognize that these are pri-
marily individual-level solutions. Ideas like practic-
ing self-compassion and avoiding body talk may
lead to lower levels of self-objectification and higher
body satisfaction among women and girls (as Engeln
finds), but it leaves the cultural dynamics and sys-
tematic oppression of women in place. This could
lead to some engaging discussions with students
about the feasibility and efficacy of these solutions
and could be used to push students to think about
how cultural change happens and to explore the dia-
lectical relationship between structure and agency.
158 Teaching Sociology 47(2)
Engeln is up front about the book’s limitations,
stating that she interviewed only cisgender women,
most of whom were college educated. Beauty Sick
would also benefit from a more nuanced analysis of
the intersections of beauty, race-ethnicity, and sexu-
ality. There are passages in which Engeln begins to
delve into how beauty sickness can affect women of
color and white women in different ways. One
example is when she discusses double-eyelid surger-
ies with Jaimie, who is Korean American. Another is
when she shares the experiences of Sasha, a black
woman who was adopted by white parents and grew
up in a predominantly white community, where bal-
let teachers picked on her and she felt like her hair
was the problem rather than her parents’ lack of
knowledge about how to style it. Pairing Beauty Sick
with texts such as former American Sociological
Association president Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s
(2009) edited volume Shades of Difference: Why
Skin Color Matters or studies that specifically sur-
vey women of color (Capodilupo 2015) would
expand these conversations by addressing the com-
plexities of race and gendered beauty ideals and how
women of color negotiate conflicting beauty ideals.
Engeln’s interviews also do not include any women
who identify as non-heterosexual as far as we are
told, and some of the lab studies she cites are predi-
cated on heterosexist assumptions (e.g., a study in
which Engeln hired only undergraduate men to give
women subjects a compliment and then track how
these compliments affected their self-objectifica-
tion). Other studies that have looked at how living in
a heterosexist context affects queer women’s body
image could be assigned to expand dialogue about
beauty sickness (Watson 2015).
Beauty Sick takes on a topic that is relevant to
introductory and upper-level undergraduate sociol-
ogy courses, especially ones focused on culture,
media, social psychology, and gender inequalities.
One of the strengths of this book is that it lends itself
to engaging classroom discussions and activities.
Engeln herself intersperses ideas for classroom exer-
cises and resources that sociology faculty could uti-
lize in their own courses. For example, while
addressing marketing and the multi-billion-dollar
makeup and beauty product industries, she outlines
an exercise in which she asks students to calculate
how much they spend on beauty products yearly. Her
students consistently discover that the women spend
three times more on average than the men do (pp.
120–21). Later, in a discussion of the mainstream
media, Engeln cites Jean Kilbourne’s Still Killing Us
Softly, the third installment in a film series that is so
popular that it has been updated to a fourth install-
ment and is widely used in undergraduate sociology
classrooms. The film would complement the book
since it provides visual examples of how advertising
promotes beauty sickness (Jhally and Kilbourne
2010). In addition, Engeln’s extended discussion of
evolutionary versus cultural factors that generate
beauty ideals could be used as the basis of a class-
room debate in which students are tasked with evalu-
ating the evolutionary arguments and contrasting
them with Engeln’s statement, “There is nothing
‘natural’ about the current beauty climate. Human
evolution does not provide an excuse for this culture”
(p. 242). Finally, the book could be added to a sylla-
bus for an upper-level seminar in cultural or gender
sociology (see, for example, Mieras 2010), and com-
plementary classroom activities could explore topics
related to consumerism, social class, and beauty
(Medley-Rath 2013; Rosen and Synder 2013).
Beauty Sick offers an opportunity to teach
undergraduate sociology students to “see the
strange in the familiar” and to analyze the causes
and consequences of a cultural phenomenon that
sustains gender, class, and racial inequalities.
References
Capodilupo, Christina. M. 2015. “One Size Does Not Fit
All: Using Variables Other Than the Thin Ideal to
Understand Black Women’s Body Image.” Cultural
Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology 21(2):268–78.
Jhally, Sut, and Jean Kilbourne. 2010. Killing Us Softly 4:
Advertising’s Image of Women. Northampton, MA:
Media Education Foundation.
Medley-Rath, Stephanie. 2013. “Pricing Beauty.” Class
activity published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and
Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington, DC:
American Sociological Association. Retrieved January
9, 2019 (http://trails.asanet.org/Pages/Resource.aspx?
ResourceID=12696).
Mieras, Emily. 2010. “Beauty and Body Image.” Class
activity published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and
Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington, DC:
American Sociological Association. Retrieved January
13, 2019 (http://trails.asanet.org/Pages/Resource.aspx?
ResourceID=9632).
Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. 2009. Shades of Difference:
Why Skin Color Matters. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Rosen, Nicole Lise, and Kay Syner. 2013. “Dissecting
Shopping Malls to Understand Gender Socialization.”
Class activity published in TRAILS: Teaching
Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology.
Washington, DC: American Sociological Associaton.
Retrieved January 9, 2019 (http://trails.asanet.org/
Pages/ Resource.aspx?ResourceID=12760).
Watson, Laurel B. 2015. “Experiences of Sexual
Objectification, Minority Stress, and Disordered
Eating among Sexual Minority Women.” Psychology
of Women Quarterly 39(4):458–70.