In recent years, feminist anthropologists have contributed to an interdisciplinary debate on beauty that focuses on gendered desires, affectivity and projects of self-making amidst a global boom in beauty products and services. Drawing on the emerging field of critical beauty studies and ethnographic research on middle-class femininity in urban Turkey, this article explores the meaning and potential of beauty as a feminist keyword in anthropology. It argues that despite men's increasing investment in beauty, beauty continues to be existentially linked to 'women'. Moreover, while beauty still means work for women, this work is often outsourced to migrant or racialised workers. Beauty norms and body images materialise in intimate encounters and specific environments. In Turkey, the recent expansion of the urban beauty economy has created spaces of possibility and aesthetic desire for ordinary women to "take care of themselves". With its neoliberal emphasis on self-care, the urban beauty economy has fostered the emergence of new female subjectivities and affective desires. Finally, the article argues for a relational feminist ethnography and pedagogy of beauty.