The success of skin lighteners as a cosmetic practice arose out of an accident of industrial history—in the 1930s tannery workers in Chicago experienced temporary depigmentation of the skin due to gloves that including the chemical compound MBH (monobenzyl ether of hydroquinone). Dermatologists quickly realized the potential of compounds derived from MBH within depigmentation treatments that corrected freckles or sought to lighten a person's entire complexion. Lynn M. Thomas includes this history in her most recent book, Beneath the Surface, an expansive and rigorously researched monograph that takes as its central subject skin lightening as an aesthetic, political, racial, and commercial practice. Her book demonstrates that practices of skin lightening have moved across geographic locations and cultural frontiers, attracting diverse and shifting groups of people (20); yet Thomas predominantly focuses on how and why Black South African women used skin lightening products. Through tracing how skin lightening intersects with racialized inequalities, consumer politics, and antiapartheid political activism, Thomas demonstrates that the use of skin lighteners has simultaneously challenged and entrenched racial and gender hierarchies in both South Africa and the wider world throughout the twentieth century. Thomas does not merely argue that skin lightening is a dangerous or racially coded practice, but she instead focuses on what makes skin lightening so pervasive and persistent throughout time, thus unraveling the dynamic historical layers “beneath the surface” of skin lightening.Beneath the Surface specifically understands skin lightening as a “technology of visibility” by which consumers “render[ed] themselves legible” in a world that was deeply circumscribed by harsh gendered and racialized hierarchies (20). Skin lightening therefore expressed individual agency as much as constraint—Black women sought to improve their social standing through skin lightening even as ostensible social improvements were entangled with hierarchical ideas about race, color, and gender that ultimately framed their oppression. Ultimately, Thomas's book compels readers to subject the persistence and practice of skin lightening to closer scrutiny—not to condemn the practice, per se, but to understand the long-standing interests and investments in such technologies; she demonstrates how appearances “were both an affective and political matter” that simultaneously challenged and entrenched racial and gender hierarchies (71). At times, readers may crave a more firm or argumentative thesis, but Thomas's multilayered approach offers a more diffuse and persuasive account of skin lightening's meanings.Although situated most powerfully as a history of twentieth-century South Africa, Thomas's geographic and temporal scopes are capacious. She decenters the overdetermined significances of colonialist epistemologies by focusing attention on precolonial southern African skin-care routines, and to the meanings of skin color within the linguistic worlds of Indigenous languages such as isiZulu, Sesotho, Setswana, and isiXhosa that predated European colonial rule. Here, she draws heavily from archaeological and anthropological evidence to observe how southern African bodily practices centered on smearing and brightening the skin with materials such as red ochre (imbola) powder and specularite. Brightness and lightness were associated with gendered and generational beauty ideals in southern Africa that subsequently became entangled with colonial practices introduced by settlers. By the early twentieth century, long-standing precolonial aesthetics of brightness intermixed with new technologies of visibility in colonial and segregationist contexts, where the “racialization of respectability” increasingly shaped the politics of personal appearance (37) and the “minute distinctions in physical appearance could open or foreclose social opportunities” (46).Thomas's analysis expands outward from South Africa to appreciate a larger, transnational discourse surrounding the “modern girl,” with her latter chapters delving into the rise of skin lightening as a billion-dollar global history. In these chapters she demonstrates how beauty and racial respectability shifted with the influx of commercial products and cultural ideas between South Africa and the United States. The fourth chapter, for instance, persuasively analyses the emotionally fraught connection between lightness and beauty within transnational Black consumer markets and media during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from Roland Marchand's concept of “social fantasy”—that advertisements reveal aspirational sentiments beyond concrete lived experience—Thomas argues many Black women in South Africa participated in the fantasy of modern consumer citizenship by purchasing lightening agents and powders. The ubiquity of skin lightening advertisements in Black South African magazines such as Zonk! and Drum, where skin lightening companies sponsored beauty pageants while highlighting the role of lightening in winners’ cosmetic praxes, iconized pageant winners as symbols of Black national pride, progress, and modernity. However, as debates over beauty, respectability, and authenticity shifted, these models increasingly faced criticism for championing a certain kind of superficial whiteness. In an important counterpoint to discourses of lightening, Thomas's last chapter analyzes the cultural shifts that occurred when Black Consciousness Movement activists and medical professionals succeeded in pushing the late apartheid government to ban skin lighteners.The story of skin lighteners in South Africa is tied to the history of apartheid, the rise of consumer capitalism, and the growth of antiracist politics in all of its affective and sometimes contradictory dimensions. Thus, Thomas's history documents the shifting cultural and political landscape in South Africa while remaining mindful of individuals’ subjectivities and personal agencies. Thomas is careful not to rely solely on print culture within the archive, but grounds her analysis in the oral histories of women who used skin lighteners. These voices include nursing students Joyce Molefe and Notumato Tyeku, who used skin lighteners in the 1960s to attract admiration when returning home from college, and Leticia Vaphi, who worked at a trading store in Langa and shared a similar desire to attract attention from strangers who noticed her beautiful skin as she walked outside. Looking good “was crucial to being satisfied with oneself” and “achieving respectability in a racialized world” (71). By creating space for the voices of women themselves, Thomas is able to attend to the complexity of Black politics, skin lightening, and women's own efforts to navigate and subvert existing hierarchies.Social and cultural history remains at the forefront of Thomas's work. She engages theory only sparingly. This decision expands the book's appeal well beyond academia, but it also leaves unanswered foundational questions regarding her theoretical understandings of both transnationality and sexuality. Thomas defines her geographic methodology as “connective comparison,” or an attention “to developments in multiple places” and how they are “linked and when they diverge” (12). However, only brief references are made to the history of skin lighteners in the Indian Ocean world, East Africa, or West Africa. Instead, she contributes to the dominant historiographic narrative by focusing on the transatlantic diaspora. Other missed opportunities occur in her assessment of social policing of women's bodies, and skin lightening practices among men. In the former case she highlights how men refuted the idea of the “modern girl,” yet rarely discusses how women policed each other's behavior. Her analysis of sexuality stops there. Did beauty cosmetics play a role in the history of sexuality in South Africa? Or are they limited to conversations over sexualization? Further, Thomas mentions only briefly that men used skin lighteners in South Africa, but she never fully fleshes out this phenomenon. Why did they use skin lighteners? Who were these men? Perhaps her social and cultural history is confined by her commitment to the “modern woman.”Still, Beneath the Surface is a commendable book, positioning skin lightening within a nuanced matrix of bodily practices, desires, experiences, contexts, and conflicts. Her deep historiographical attentiveness to a complex history eschews looking to African history only for “simple origin stories or stark narratives of oppression versus resistance” (236). Rather, Thomas offers a “layered history” that ultimately recognizes “composite meanings and unexpected conjunctures” (236). She successfully demonstrates how and why scholars need to embrace both subtlety and surprise in the past, making room for “less predictable” and “more liberatory” futures (236). Thomas's work is thus a novel contribution to both African history and gender studies. As the first monograph on skin lighteners in South Africa, and the first study of the history of opposition to skin lighteners, Beneath the Surface is a triumph on many levels.