If you click ‘look inside’ you can read the ‘Introduction’ free of charge on Princeton’s website.

​Perfect Me is available on Abe Books and Amazon​ for under £20 for a new paperback, and there are hardback and used options.

Arguments in Perfect me

  • There are four features of the beauty ideal: thinness, firmness, smoothness and youth.
  • The beauty ideal is global (for women), meaning that it is homogenising, naturalising, and normalising. This turns beauty practices into health and hygiene practices and makes the rising demands of beauty invisible.
  • How we look is who we are, such that we think a better body is a ‘better self’.
  • We identify our selves with our bodies, but not just our actual bodies, also our transforming bodies and our imagined future bodies, ‘the perfect me’.
  • Body work has become virtuous, and failing to improve your body (letting yourself go) is a moral failure.
  • Very little is about choice – we don’t, as individuals choose our beauty ideals – and we cannot simply choose to ‘opt out’. The extent to which beauty ideals fall on individuals is largely due to social position.
  • As men engage in beauty practices and aspire to unrealistic ideals, old arguments that women do beauty ‘for men’ or that beauty practices are simply about gender subordination no longer work.
  • We should not – ever – blame individuals for what they do or don’t do to their own bodies. To address the rising demands of beauty we need collective responses that change the way we collectively value beauty and address the negative impacts of lookism.  

Praise for Perfect Me

  • The Atlantic, in an article, ‘The 19 best books of 2018’ picked Perfect Me as one of the books of the year (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/12/the-19-best-books-2018/578134/) It states, “Heather Widdows, in Perfect Me, considers the far-ranging implications of attractiveness rendered in the imperative, giving beauty itself, in the process, the rigorously intellectual treatment it deserves. The book, an academic title with mass-market implications, considers beauty as a construction, racialized and gendered; beauty as a constriction, often punishing and occasionally cruel; and beauty as a goal that remains, for most, persistently out of reach. Perfect Me is a treatise that often reads, fittingly, as an indictment--a book that recognizes all the ways people are taught, still, to judge books by their covers”.
  • Edarabia  lists Perfect Me as one of the ‘100 books to read in 2021’.
  • Elise Hu, journalist and author of Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital (Dutton, 2023) said “Perfect Me catalysed my thinking at the most crucial point in the thinking and reporting process” (312).
  • Anne Kingston, writes in Maclean's that “Perfect Me, a buzzed-about new book by Heather Widdows, argues women face unprecedented pressure to appear thinner, younger and firmer”.
  • Maya Singer, described Perfect me in Vogue as a “groundbreaking 2018 treatise”.
  • Bri Lee, prize winning journalist in her article ‘Books That Changed Me’ said: “Heather Widdows gave me language to understand my own thought processes around my body, and that framework freed me from years of accidentally accumulated bullshit thinking. I'm grateful I stumbled onto it. I think of it frequently”.
  • Regan Penaluna, in Guenrica, described Perfect Me as “a sharp and accessible read”.
  • Amanda Hess, in the New York Times, said “In . . . Perfect Me, Heather Widdows, a philosophy professor at the University of Birmingham, England, convincingly argues that the pressures on women to appear thinner, younger and firmer are stronger than ever”.
  • Meagan Garber, in The Atlantic, said “In 1990 . . . Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, her examination--and her indictment--of the way attractiveness functions as both a metaphor for and a mandate over women's lives. The book now has a sequel, of sorts. . . . Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal . . . [is] a scholarly work that is urgently relevant to the current cultural moment”.
  • Samantha Brennan, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, said “Widdows deserves high praise for her interdisciplinary work in this book and its combination with philosophical rigor”
  • M.A. Betz, in Choice Reviews, said “Widdows is at her best in her analysis of liberalism's uncritical glorification of choice (and therefore responsibility), which fails to consider social contexts and pressures and so allows for victim blaming when women 'choose' to comply with beauty standards”.
  • Kathy Davis, in European Journal of Women's Studies, said “Perfect Me is well-worth reading for anyone who is concerned about the importance of beauty in modern life and the imperative to develop critical perspectives for thinking about it. It sets out the questions that we need to be thinking about and does so in a way that makes it clear what is at stake in our search for evermore-perfect bodies”.​
From the Back Cover
  •  "Widdows brings much-needed subtlety to current conversations about the moral and social role of physical appearance in our daily lives."--A. W. Eaton, editor of Talk to Her
  • "Innovative and original."--Anne Phillips, author of The Politics of the Human
  • "This groundbreaking book is an extended reflection on what Widdows argues to be the increasingly demanding norms of feminine beauty. Perfect Me moves forward from both second wave feminist critiques of the 'fashion-beauty complex' and third wave feminist insistence on individual empowerment and choice. Widdows acknowledges the pleasures of the beauty ideal but argues that it produces significant communal harms. She proposes reframing these harms as public health concerns, a shift that opens the way for new and more systemic ethical analyses."--Alison M. Jaggar, University of Colorado at Boulder