This is a book about skin. The strange wonderfulness of our bodily covering inside and outside at once. What happens to it when something goes wrong. How the world responds to imperfection and difference. It’s about how skin makes us who we are in ways we can and cannot control.
Skin Deep explores beauty, ageing, health and illness, tanning and touch. It interrogates whiteness, and the historical and ongoing structural contradictions of skin colour. Paradoxically, skin is a barrier and a contact zone. It is miraculous, our biggest organ. It heals and remakes itself!
Phillipa McGuinness engages with plastic surgeons, dermatologists, public health experts, beauticians, people with melanoma, tattoo artists, massage therapists and all kinds of people comfortable in their own skin, and not. She has written a book that gets under your skin, one where science meets art and culture, history and politics. Philosophy too, given skin is the point where our self may struggle with the way others see us. And the way we see ourselves.