A teen who secretly arrived with the meteor that gave her small hometown its name discovers that she is turning back into stardust and teams up with her best friend in an effort to secure her human existence by entering a local beauty pageant that has always been won by thin, blonde, white girls. Everyone knows Meteor, New Mexico got its name from the space rock that crashed into the desert nearby. Nobody knows that Lita Perez came with it-- or that...

When Massie is kicked out of her exclusive riding camp and her parents insist that she get a summer job, she becomes the highest-selling Be Pretty Cosmetics girl ever by ignoring the company's philosophy.

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s,...