SOURCE: Picardie, Justine. “The Suffering Sex.” New Statesman & Society (21 September 1990): 39–40.

In the following review of The Beauty Myth, Picardie commends Wolf's moving personal accounts and insight, but criticizes in her “muddled” argument and use of statistics.

A great deal of attention has been paid to this book: the Sunday Times has paid a large sum of money to serialise it; the author, a young American woman called Naomi Wolf, recently appeared on both The Late Show and breakfast television. Magazine profiles have been written; glamorous pictures taken of the attractive Ms Wolf. For The Beauty Myth is, according to the publishers, “the direct descendant of The Second Sex and The Female Eunuch,” “a cultural hand grenade for the nineties,” “the book which no woman today can afford to ignore.”

The result of all this publicity is, perhaps, that The Beauty Myth will be viewed with a sharper eye...