“Beneath the Surface is nothing short of a tour de force. Lynn M. Thomas's ‘layered history’ does justice to the immensely difficult subject of skin lighteners. Carefully attending to the complex politics of race and color that are grounded in skin, Thomas at once provides a vibrant history of South Africa and a global history of commodity, beauty, and the body. This landmark study sets a new standard in the field.” - Julie Livingston, author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa
“Allowing for a comparative analysis over a period of time when the global relationships and meanings of skin color became tied to class, race, and racism, Beneath the Surface helps us understand the intense and long-standing interest whites and blacks have had in lightening the color of their skin despite the potential for severe health risks. There is simply no other book like it.” - Noliwe M. Rooks, author of Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women
"Thomas explores, with nuance and sensitivity how skin whitening/lightening figured into precolonial concepts of beauty, how these practices took on new forms during the colonial and apartheid eras, and how they endure in a neoliberal democratic South Africa." - Cara Moyer-Duncan, Africa Is a Country
"Beneath the Surface makes a necessary contribution to [a] small pool of work on beauty and geography as Thomas' analysis integrates these subjects in considering the (trans)national politics and racial inequalities that uphold skin lightening.… This book would appeal to both undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars interested in beauty, geopolitics, race, and colonialism." - Meena Pyatt, Gender, Place & Culture
"Beneath the Surface adds a scholarly dimension to a deeply personal and political issue about the skin we live in.… The nexus between the political and the personal implications of this history raises many questions for future research." - Dr Athambile Masola, Journal of Contemporary African Studies
“Moving chronologically from precolonial South Africa to the 20th century, the author accomplishes her goal of historically elucidating the ‘chain of causes’ that animate skin-altering practices. The text is successful in other aspects as well, specifically how Thomas highlights transnational movements of black bodies and images, making visible the ways ideas of blackness circulate in the world, and illustrating that not only white ideals travel. Similarly, by including discussions of the history of body surface manipulations by white Europeans and South Africans, the author debunks popular notions that anchor preoccupation with skin color, primarily in black communities.” - K. Gentles-Peart, Choice
“Thomas resourcefully assembles and interweaves sources connecting popular, business, medical and political culture. …. Beneath the Surface would be an engaging key text for students to study a history of race and gender within everyday global beauty cultures.” - Fabiola Creed, Metascience
"Beneath the Surface is the most comprehensive book regarding skin lighteners available to date and it is both interesting and innovative.… The book has value as a postgraduate textbook relevant to the fields of history, social science, geopolitics, gender studies, geography, psychology, dermatology, and others. The layered, integrated history presented by Thomas in Beneath the Surface is indeed 'a landmark study' of skin colour and skin lighteners that interrogates every influencing factor from slavery and segregation to consumer capitalism, political protests and reinforced social inequities, and beyond." - Caradee White, South African Journal of Science
"Lynn Thomas’s Beneath the Surface constructs a history of skin lighteners that is simultaneously rigorous in its historical evidence base and virtuosic in its lucid articulation of the technologies as they are mobilised in complex contexts in and beyond South Africa. . . . Its biopolitical argument is convincingly made and compelling." - Vivette Garcia-Deister, BioSocieties
"This is an impressive book that will surely be a classic for scholars interested in aesthetics, beauty politics, and gender. It is an especially welcome addition to the literature as it centers on African history from a transnational perspective. It also has much to offer those with specialization in the history of science, medicine, and technology." - Oluwakemi M. Balogun, Journal of African History
"Lynn Thomas’s Beneath the Surface... is an exemplar of academic scholarship that treats a culturally salient and sensitive issue with care, enfolding into the critical analysis of skin lighteners a carefully considered, and indeed compassionate, treatment of the complex, often divisive, issues of embodiment." - Arya Thampuran, The British Journal for the History of Science
