Title: The Thrifty Girl's Guide to Glamour Author: Susie Galvez Publisher: Polka Dot Press Publish Date: 2006 Pages: 231 Genres:: How-To Guide, Non-Fiction Reviewer: J. Arathoon

Rating:

In The Thrifty Girl’s Guide to Glamour, Susie Galvez is trying hard to create a complete manual that covers all the beauty basics one can imagine, while putting a do-it-yourself or do-it-for-cheap spin on things. In large part, she succeeds. It’s hard to deny that this book is jam-packed with useful tips. There isn’t a single anecdote or irrelevant tangent; instead, Galvez is almost relentless in the way she presents her information, cramming tip after tip into her chapters. The book is well organized and easy to navigate, split into individual sections that focus on various standard beauty subjects—skin, hair, wardrobe, etc. Galvez doesn’t leave any significant stone unturned, and by the end of the book you do feel like you’ve been given a thorough cover of all the basics.

But the problem is that the tips are essentially too basic. There wasn’t a tip in here I hadn’t read elsewhere. Anyone who has read women’s fashion magazines will have seen most of the ideas in this book—tips like identifying the shape of your face by tracing its outline on a mirror with a dry erase marker, or throwing your mascara away every three months, or remembering not to use soap on your face. Even if you don’t know this information offhand, most of this sort of information is available for free at sites like About.com.

The focus for this book is on the glamour, not on the thrifty, but the glamour side has been well covered many times before. What the book didn’t have was what I was hoping for: directions on how to cut my own hair, for example, or how to make my own makeup. That sort of make-it-yourself attitude is sorely lacking, and Galvez goes so far as to recommend things like whitening your teeth through laser, which runs “from $1,000 upward.” Perhaps that is glamorous, but thrifty it ain’t.

Moreover, the tone of the book sounds very dated, to the point where I actually checked the copyright multiple times throughout to make sure that it wasn’t written in the 80s or before. For example, we find this delightful tidbit on page 40: “Baseball caps can be oh so chic when paired with a great pair of earrings and the perfect lip color. Look for hats with glitzy fabrics such as metallic or colored leather. They’re perfect for the mad Saturday morning errand dashes.”

The voice of the writing often comes across as fussy and maternal, using words like “sassy,” as if you were having a discussion with an older, matriarchal figure, one who tells you authoritatively that, as far as necklaces go, “A strand of pearls—real or costume—is a must.” The tips in general aren’t wrong (well, sparkly baseball caps aside); they just often feel outdated, outmoded, and largely unoriginal.

However, as an absolute starter beauty book, this isn’t terrible. Someone who really didn’t have a clue where to start—a young teenager beginning to embrace her femininity, perhaps, or a man just starting to release his inner drag queen—would probably find some useful tips in here. And even if you’re a thrifty beauty pro, the book might remind you of a tip you’d forgotten, or never got around to trying out before.