I’m delighted to share my book review of Claudia Liebelt’s Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey, now published in Contemporary Sociology. The book opens a window onto Istanbul’s “beautyscapes”- salons, clinics, everyday routines—showing how beauty work is tightly woven into class mobility, gendered respectability, and urban transformation. Rather than rehearsing the empowerment/oppression binary, Liebelt traces how bodies become sites where citizenship, aspiration, and morality are negotiated in contemporary Türkiye.

Why it matters (in a nutshell):

• Ethnographic depth that lets readers hear workers’ and clients’ voices.
• Conceptual clarity on how aesthetics, governance, and markets meet in everyday life.
• Cross-field relevance for sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and Middle East studies.

My review is for the curious—meant to spark interest, not replace the book. If these themes resonate with your work, I hope you’ll read the full review and then dive into the monograph itself.

Citation:
Şahinol, M. (2025). Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 54(6), 530-534. https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061251374867kk (Original work published 2025)