Brings together years of interest in beauty, desire and surface in the United Arab Emirates. The transformative potential promised by the beauty industry, with its advertisements, packaging, habits and routines, mirrors the language of national growth and economic development and privileges newness as progress. The city's surface behaves like human skin, ageing, shedding and regenerating: posters and advertisements leave traces on walls, where pastoral murals and images of paradise promise a world beyond. Paced with images of the artist taken at photography studios and with beauty product packages promising whiteness and brilliance, the book illustrates the anxieties of coming of age and the need to keep reinventing oneself in a place of shifting ideals.