In ‘The House of Beauty,’ Arabelle Sicardi Dives Into Beauty’s Lesser-told Tales

More than 10 years in the making, Arabelle Sicardi’s “The House of Beauty” has arrived.

The book, a collection of eight essays penned by the former beauty editor that assess the industry and all of its contradictions, is launching Oct. 14.

Chapters range from a comprehensive dive into the origins of Chanel No.5 to an interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” portion to myriad analyses of how beauty products and services are sold. The book will be available for $30 at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple Books and more.

Among the sentiments explored in “The House of Beauty” are those that Sicardi hadn’t been able to dive into the same way during their editor days.

“I had a bucket list of the different stories I would love to write if I wasn’t afraid of getting in trouble due to advertiser dollars, and so I started reporting them on my own terms and they became this book,” said Sicardi, formerly beauty editor at BuzzFeed who now writes the “You’ve Got Lipstick on Your Chin” Substack newsletter and helms the Perfumed Pages scent event collective, popular among the #FragranceTok community.

Sicardi will fete the launch with hybrid book reading/perfume swap events in select cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, wherein attendees can bring fragrances from their collections to connect and trade with others.

“The community of beauty culture that I wrote this book for didn’t exist 10 years ago when I started,” said Sicardi. “The way we understand beauty culture now has so much to do with discourse and identity politics and how people feel valued and perceived by brands. The landscape has shifted drastically, and I wrote this book for this version of our conversations — where we’re having these difficult conversations all the time.”

Signed, preorder copies of “The House of Beauty” are also available at certain bookstores including Books Are Magic in New York and Skylight Books in Los Angeles. Those copies come with bookmarks scented with Jouissance’s powdery Les Cahiers Secrets, which Sicardi wore during much of the editing process.

“I want anyone who’s ever stepped into a Sephora to read this book; I want people who are gifted perfumes during the holidays because no one knows what to get them to read it; I want people that just talk about beauty in the group chat a lot to read it,” Sicardi said. “There’s so much information overload and overwhelm, and this book exists in the landscape of that chaos, and tries to create a framework to understand it a bit better.”