Facing the Mirror: Older Women and Beauty Shop Culture.

Facing the Mirror: Older Women and Beauty Shop Culture. By Frida Kerner Furman. New York: Routledge, 1997, 224 pp., $16.95 (paper).

Facing the Mirror combines studies of aging, Judaism, and beauty into an excellent ethnographic study of a beauty salon in Chicago. It investigates the affirming community that the shop provides to clients who frequent it. The author, an associate professor of religious studies at DePaul University, adds her research to the extremely understudied population of older, middle-class women. She does so in a multidisciplinary fashion, straying from her own area of social ethics into sociology, anthropology, gerontology, communication, religion, …