The Global Beauty Industry is an interdisciplinary text that uses beauty to explore topics of gender, race, class, colorism, nation, bodies, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and intersectionality. Integrating materials from a wide range of cultural and geo-political contexts, it coalesces with initiatives to produce more internationally relevant curricula in fields such as sociology, as well as cultural, women's/gender, media, and globalization studies.

Meeta Rani Jha is a feminist sociologist and an anti-racist activist. She is a scholar-in-residence at Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG) in the Gender and Women's Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley, US. She has taught sociology, globalization, transnational feminist cultural studies, critical race, ethnicity, and media studies at a number of universities in the San Francisco Bay area (currently at the University of San Francisco, US) and in London. For a long time she was a community organizer on issues of racial discrimination, low pay, migration, domestic violence, and homeworking in the UK.

1. The Miss America Beauty Pageant: Race and Nation-Making 2. Black is Beautiful anti-racist Beauty Aesthetic and Cultural Resistance 3. Globalization, Indian Beauty Nationalism, and Colorism: Class, Caste and Gender Stratification 4. Chinese Femininity, Beauty Economy, Cosmetic Surgery 5. Conclusion: A Complex model of Beauty Resistance