Sarah Bennett is uneasy with the bikini wax craze, so much so that it ends a friendship. Making her debut as an essayist here, Bennett demonstrates a rare gift, funny and true, for capturing the interior emotional life of young women. Speaking of feminism, Barbara Hall brought strong, left of centre female voices to television as the creator of ‘Judging Amy’ and ‘Joan of Arcadia’.  She writes of finding her own voice in ‘Kung Fu Kissing’.

I had told my contributors that their essays need not be positive about their ‘intimate’, still, I was stunned by Francesca Lia Block’s ‘Not A Pretty Story’ in which she recounts her entanglement with an unsavory plastic surgeon. And Laren Stover’s ‘The Chi Gong Show’ in which she traces the $60k she spent in one year under the spell of a Chi Gong master who said he could cure her cancer.

As you will read, Ellen Karsh abhors being touched and is proud to admit it. What does it say that the other three ‘Don’t Touch Me’s’- Julie Burchill, Suzanne Moore and Barbara Ellen – are all British?

Lena Levin’s essay covers hair, pedicure and massage and asks ‘If you can’t speak up for yourself in the beauty salon, can you do it in real life?’  Lena Levin is a pseudonym and even I don’t know who she is. All I can say is how happy I was when I received her extraordinary essay and it is because of her story that I will be donating proceeds, after paying the writers, to RAINN, the Rape And Incest National Network.

My own essay, 'A Fixed Ideal', investigates my old obsession with a Buddhist tattoo artist. Many consider tattoo terribly ugly, and can't imagine what place it holds in a beauty book. My reply is that, as far as I'm concerned, like the hypothetical place where communism meets fascism, ugly and beautiful have more in common than they know.

Last but not least, it makes me incredibly proud to publish my own mother, Judy Raines, whose Vogue interviews with people like Terry Gilliam and Fay Weldon first interested me in writing. I always knew I loved New York in the fifties and sixties, but it took reading her story to realize I had been having false memory syndrome: hers.

When my mum first came over to LA to meet my partner’s mom, I took them to Jessica Nail Clinic on Sunset, which is where I got the genesis for this book idea. Full of Old Hollywood matriarchs -I met Gene Kelly’s widow there- I am always the youngest in the room. The wives, movie stars and studio execs have been going to the same person every Monday for thirty years (indeed, in my interview with Jessica Vartoughian, the founder, she boasts of doing Tori Spelling's nails from age five). It is thanks to vanity that they have a relationship with fascinating women they otherwise would never know, women about whom they care deeply.

Alex Kucynski has written a whole book about America’s addiction to plastic surgery. Nora Ephron's ‘What I Hate About My Neck’ is, on writing, on its eighteenth printing. Here, we look into the friendships that have emerged from our vanity. Read, for example, about Hollywood power manager Joy Gorman, single handedly determined to keep Jane Tran’s tiny Melrose nail shop alive. And prepare to faint with pleasure at the incredible friendship between masseuse, Asa Wrange and the 93 year old artist formerly known as ‘Topsy Young’.

This is a unique set up but not entirely: psychiatry also works because we only see those people once a week or month and never outside that room. That’s why we feel free to tell them things we might not tell our family. As facialist, Bebe Rudu, explains, they often feel the same about us.

In these pages we cover heartbreak, divorce, cutting, virginity, body dysmorphia, sexual abuse and parental suicide. If the essays that emerged were not what I was expecting; the authors probably weren't expecting them either. Truth is an unpredictable trigger. You start thinking about your body and your body becomes a kind of detached witness. Memory monsters splash to the surface from water that looked clear.

It's real women talking about real things, with raw honesty and courage and balls. And hope. I’m happy to say that seems to be part of the current climate. Look at how Joan Didion's book on grief engaged. And Jeanette Walls’ brilliant memoir about her intense childhood. People are maybe more honest now? Yes, they want to kvetch. And polish. Distract. Go light and fluffy. They also want this type of permission -- and articulation -- of things maybe they hadn't faced, or realized -- and in context of our desire, human, so human, to be touched, make human connection, look pretty, healthy, desirable – the power of strangers.

Excerpted from "Damage Control: Women on the Therapists, Beauticians, and Trainers Who Navigate Their Bodies," by Emma Forrest. Copyright 2007 by Emma Forrest.  Published by HarperCollins. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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