Celebrity Skin: Tattoos, Brands, and Body Adornments of the Stars

Rating:
Summary: totally dissapointed
Review: Celebrity Skin by Jim Gerard gives the reader just what it says: skin. The collection, while titled with a body art slant, looks more like a group of celebrity photos where everyone just happens to have some body art, rather than focusing directly on it. Many of the tattoos could have been showcased more if the portraits had been posed for that purpose instead of being collected from previous publications. Written material about the celebs and their tats is of mixed length and quality. Overall, this is more like a book of celebrity tattoos for the dentist's office, and not a great addition to the tattoo library that it could have been.

Rating:
Summary: Celebrity Skin needs more to really shine
Review: Celebrity Skin by Jim Gerard gives the reader just what it says: skin. The collection, while titled with a body art slant, looks more like a group of celebrity photos where everyone just happens to have some body art, rather than focusing directly on it. Many of the tattoos could have been showcased more if the portraits had been posed for that purpose instead of being collected from previous publications. Written material about the celebs and their tats is of mixed length and quality. Overall, this is more like a book of celebrity tattoos for the dentist's office, and not a great addition to the tattoo library that it could have been.

Rating:
Summary: Starstruck
Review: I have read the other reviews online, which is what prompted me to write. Although I agree with some of their points, this title is a beautiful addition for anyone interested in the stars. Never before has there been a collection of adornments of the stars, and I found the text rather intriguing. I feel this book is accessible to everyone, not just tatoo freaks, and the design and layout are great.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: It has nothing but pre-published photos we have all seen before in magazines. The tats aren't even shown. They talk about how Angelina has a lot of them but they don't even list them all. Not made for the true tattoo enthusist. A coffee table book at best. It describes their crazy childhoods more than the tats.

Rating:
Summary: TRUELY DISAPPOINTING
Review: What probably started off as a good idea over drinks late one night, this book looks like it was hurrily stitched together the next day like Frankenstein's monster. It seems like the author clipped up all his old People magazines and, along with every file photo he could lay his hands on, slapped together 2 pages for every celebrity/group he had. That's when the trouble starts. The pictures, more often then not, don't highlight the tattoos (or other body art) because they weren't shot for that purpose. They were just rounded up for Gerard to hang some lame (often smarmy) information around. This info is broken down into 4 categories : The Inside Scoop (a quickie bio), Raw Data (real names, birth [and sometimes death] dates, accomplishments, etc.), Skin Deep (obviously incomplete info about the celeb's body art that doesn't even list what is clearly showing in the accompanying photos), and Strange But True (Ripley's Believe It Or Not need not worry). The most glaring error of the book occurs when Gerard describes the tattoos that adore each of the shoulders of the late Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes of TLC. If you were to look at the pictures showing these 2 tattoos, you would immediately notice that both are shown to reside on the left shoulder (the 80/falcon tat on page 144 was indeed on the left). While I didn't expect to see every marking on each celeb's body (at least not here), I bought this book expecting to see a little more. The back cover advertises "Up close (strike 1) and lavish (strike 2), here is the ultimate collection (strike 3 - yer out) of beauty marks for beautiful people". I'm glad I didn't pay full cover price for this turkey. Truely disappointing.