Go deeper

The library

For after a question, not instead of one. Books, films, podcasts and research on where our beliefs — about beauty, bodies and each other — come from.

Type of resource

Subject — as in the Unlearning Circles

READ
The Beauty Myth
Naomi Wolf
How can beauty function as a mechanism of control over women?
READ
No Logo
Naomi Klein
How does capitalism turn identity into a product?
READ
Doppelganger
Naomi Klein
What happens when self-improvement becomes a permanent project?
READ
Fearing the Black Body
Sabrina Strings
The racial origins of fat phobia, long before it was framed as health.
READ
Flawless
Elise Hu
Inside a beauty economy where the ideal is engineered and exported.
READ
Fat Girls in Black Bodies
Joy Cox
Belonging, size and race — beyond the language of acceptance.
READ
Hair Story
Ayana Byrd & Lori Tharps
Untangling the roots of Black hair in America.

WATCH
Subjects of Desire
Documentary
On the shifting cultural appropriation of Black beauty.
WATCH
Embrace
Documentary
Body image, shame and the industries that profit from both.
WATCH
Miss Representation
Documentary
How media portrayal shapes who gets taken seriously.
WATCH
Shrill
Series
A comedy that refuses the transformation arc.

LISTEN
Maintenance Phase
Podcast
Debunking the wellness and weight-loss industries, episode by episode.
LISTEN
Talks on colorism and colonial aesthetics
Various
Search for scholars working on skin tone, media and value.

EXPLORE
Appearance bias in hiring and pay
Peer-reviewed literature
What happens when appearance becomes an economic variable.
EXPLORE
Filters, social media and body image
Peer-reviewed literature
Evidence is mixed and still developing — read the methods, not the headlines.

EXPLORE
Whose aesthetic became universal?
Decolonial theory
Reading paths on coloniality, taste and the making of a global standard.
EXPLORE
Intersectionality
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Why beauty standards land differently depending on who is carrying them.

Curious where the investigation began?

Prefer to start from the questions? The twelve-room investigation is described on that page.