Beauty is big business.

93% of British women use a cosmetic of some sort (the highest percentage in Europe) and £5 billion is spent on them each year. More and more of us opt for the cosmetic surgery: there were 65% more surgeries carried out in 2004 than 2003, 92% of the patients were women.

Yet despite the huge spend, one thing appears to remain unchanged: women's dissatisfaction with the way that they look. A 2005 survey in Bliss magazine revealed that only 8% of young women were happy with their body.

What should women look like? What should women wear? Should they style their hair? These vexed questions have been as hotly debated in the pages of the feminist press as in articles found in women's popular magazines, as ideas of what it is to be a woman are so often played out on the very surfaces of women's bodies.

For the Edwardian rational dress movement getting rid of the corset was a liberation; in the 70s, feminists used the bra to symbolise the constraints imposed on women's lives; and in the 90s arguments raged as to whether the Wonderbra's plunging cleavage signalled the arrival of the sexually confident woman or a return to submission.