Cher's Beauty Book - Cher Scholar

So the long and the short of it is: there is no Cher beauty book.

Amazingly, Cher is a reluctant beauty guru. As she just said at the 2026 Garnier Q&A, she doesn’t like rules. Maybe this is why we have no Cher Beauty Book full of rules.

We have her fitness book with Robert Haas, Forever Fit (1991). We have her exercise videos where Cher follows the lead of other instructors. She usually brings another “expert” in and presents herself as a fellow student.

But over the many decades Cher has made many beauty product recommendations. And she has been peppered with beauty questions since the 1960s. There are probably hundreds of articles about a time when Cher mentioned a beauty product in an interview. And there are just as many roundups of all her iconic looks. So, it’s not like we don’t have material to work with here.

I’ve assembled as much as I could to start us off and I’ll try to add as many tips as I can find in my archives.

It probably all started back in the 1960s teen magazines when all the girls were trying to copy the Cher look, like those Q&As from 16 Magazine (we’ll get to that).

By the 1970s, magazines were doing big spreads about Cher’s more glamourous look. Here’s something from my scrapbook, a photocopy of a magazine from the the era when I was researching Cher in my high school and local libraries in the 1980s, photocopying everything I found. Sources? I made no note of sources. When will I ever need sources?

The special look of all-out glamour, Cher (magazine and date unknown).

But here Cher says when asked how her friends describe her look: “I don’t know. Beauty and how you look are things that I’m not into. I like to talk about the way other people look.”

Who does she think is beautiful? Mica Ertegun (wife of Ahmet), Marisa Berenson, “Charlotte Rampling…she’s better than beautiful. Just-beautiful gets boring.”

In Sonny & Cher, A Family Again collectors magazine from 1977, Cher said “I knew I could never be beautiful…” which is just insane but that might be why never made a Beauty Book too. In this magazine she talks about how Sonny was the first person to convince her that “I had a lot going for me” including “a great looking nose” which may sound surprising since one of the Variety Show tropes was Sonny teasing Cher about her big nose. But turns out, maybe he liked it.

Even the collector’s magazine Cher Superstar (1975) had a “Cher Look” section:

So we can piece together decades of beauty talk. And that’s interesting in itself.

The Chapters

I’ve split up the available advice into typical categories similar to what is found in other beauty guru books:

Your Beauty Lifestyle Category

Let’s start with our general beauty lifestyle category. We’ll find that out from this book:

Shake Your Head, Darling by Jose Eber (1982)

And yes you may recognize that person on the cover as Susie Coelho. She was the third wife of Sonny and this photo is uncredited in the book but Cher references Coelho as a client on her page blurb and Coelho’s name is on the sample lifestyle questionnaire.

(You can click to enlarge any of these pictures.)

I was 12 when this book came out. I do not know how I knew Cher was in this book but I did and finagled a copy. Unfortunately, I tore out the Cher section and added it to my scrapbook. I had no sense of Mint Copy. Fans may recognize the Harry Langdon Cher photos in this book because they ended up as the assets for the I Paralyze album (also in 1982). Notes in the credits say that only Cher’s photos were done by Harry Langdon and that makeup was done by James Cooper Jr. (for the whole book or just Cher?).

Anyway, the book starts with a lifestyle quiz that I think is a good introduction to how to approach your beauty needs. Specifically, how much do you care about it, how much time do you have, how rich and servant-dependent are you?

Eber divides us all up into lifestyles by three colors:

Red: “Crazy-busy,” maybe with a few jobs, kids and little time for yourself. You’re always on the go and have no time to primp. On the back cover Farrah Fawcett is the example for this color. (This is kind of hard to believe. That hair doesn’t feather itself.)

Green: You’re busy working and “can’t get involved in complicated hairstyles.” But you want “a look” and you want “your look” to last the whole day and into the evening. You have a refresh makeup kit in your purse. Brenda Vaccaro is the example here and I don’t know who that is.

Blue: “Lucky you–your time is your own.” You have the time, patience and funds. You change looks during the day. “Your main desire is to look as good as you can” and “you’re no novice.” The description ends with “you are the woman every other woman envies.”

Eber is planting the seed here for you to want to be code Blue; because that sentence, outside of a marketing idea, is just ridiculous. Many women have no desire to go full-primp. I know. They’re my friends. A whole class of people, in all income-brackets, don’t care about this shit. I am always an outlier in my various friend groups.

Is it any surprise that Cher is the poster-child for Blue?

Eber’s introduction then goes into things like face shape, hair type, age, health, the climate you live in.

So I filled this out the questionnaire when I was 12 and I had no job so I guess it’s not that shocking I was on the cusp of Green and Blue. But then again, I do like to go to a spa but I am not rich. I had no clue what face shape I was back then (or really up until recently). But my score and hair type confirms what my hairdressers have always known about me: layers (and sometimes bangs). For fine hair, I was aided with the body perms popular in the 1980s.

This was also me before I started coloring my hair in high school, which my grandmother and mother’s hairdresser thought I was too young to do but they all let me do anyway. And that’s how I was all the colors and got it out of my system.

You can see I’ve just crossed out jobs like some kind of gentry. Turns out Cher did the same. Work! Peasants. But Cher at 36 was way more employed than I was.

Look at how swell my 12-year old handwriting was before carpel tunnel.

Every celebrity in this book has gorgeous headshots to go with their questionnaire answers and Jose Eber makes comments about everyone’s hair.

These are the Cher pages:

Cher is indecisive here as usual: sometimes picking “all of the above” or saying “it depends.”

But basically this is all to say: be realistic. Consider your other interests before you invest in a beauty lifestyle you’re really not all that into.

Cher labels her beauty routine as sensible and practical and not time-consuming. She’s a Blue who doesn’t know she’s blue.

A Note About Feminine Care

In the 1980s Cher did an magazine ad for breast exams:

None of the beauty books I’ve read ever talk much about this kind of healthcare for women. But you gotta get your lady-bits checked out, like regularly. Consider this: in 1974 when Cher needed to figure out how to save the live of Alan Gorrie, the bassist of the Average White Band, while he was suffering from an accidental overdose, she called her gynecologist who told her what to do. My point is, have a gynecologist.

Cher and Aging

The amazing thing about 2026 is the fact that Cher is changing how we think about beauty and older women. Stay tuned.

In the article Cher on Beauty Standards and Aging in Irish Times (2024), they remind us that when was asked if she accepted the unrealistic beauty standards that are part of the deal for women in the public eye, Cher told BBC Radio 4s Desert Island Discs, “It’s a bitch, but I’m in it…I play by my own rules, but still, there’s a standard to keep up and if you can do it, you do it for as long as you can, because it’s more fun.” Cher agreed that staying beautiful is not expected or required of men, adding: “But what is?… They just come in, in their jeans, shaved or not, but men in Hollywood are vain…it’s hard for women because men can get scraggly. They can get old….I see some women doing it, Helen (Mirren) does it really well. And Judi (Dench).”

Mental Beauty

Over and over, Cher says beauty is a state of mind. In Sonny & Cher, A Family Again collectors magazine (1977), she says it’s the “way you feel about yourself” and “your self-concept that told the world how to look at you.” “The world saw you as you saw yourself.” And later in the article, “she wants to stress again beauty is as beauty feels.”

Even in the Garnier Q&A (2026): “it’s just what I feel, how I feel. You know, it’s how I feel….Just depends on how you feel…It doesn’t make any difference. It’s how you feel…That’s the only thing that matters. Like, do you feel great in it?”

In her book Forever Fit (1991) Cher talks about doing Transcendental Meditation and at the very end of the book Cher starts talking about spirituality and trying to do one spiritual thing every day, how she does this with books, books-on-tape and meditations, all of which she brings on her tour as part of her post-show, makeup-removing rituals.

Talk of this turns into self-help and she gives a list of self-help book recommendations:

Each Day a New Beginning: Daily Meditations for Women by Karen Casey (Hazelden Meditations)
Mediations for Women Who Do Too Much by Anne Wilson Schaef (there’s now a journal version and one for men too by Jonathon Lazear with an introduction by Anne Wilson Schaef)
Healing the Child Within by Charles Whitfield (which also has a workbook)
The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck
Stranger in a Strange Land, the novel by Robert A. Heinlein
You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
A Course in Miracles by Marion Williamson
Love is Letting Go of Fear by Gerald G. Jampolsky
Codependent No More by Melody Beattie
Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Brandshaw

Other Beauty Gurus

To prep for this I read a bunch of other 1980s Celebrity Beauty books and reviewed them on Substack:

As part of that process, my new chiweenie became a beauty guru and I posted her beauty recommendations on Substack as well: