Gift-giving peaks this time of year, with many people also using vacation and down time to catch up on reading.

	Allure magazine editors reveal 15 years of style and beauty experiences in "Confessions of a Beauty Editor." Click photo for larger image.

So a good book can make a great gift. This year, publishers released scores of books on fashion and beauty. Here are reviews of six of the newest and most interesting:

"The Look: A Guide to Dressing From the Inside Out" by Randolph Duke (Clarkson Potter, $24.95)

Mr. Duke has something to say about looking good, and he knows how to say it. Although he's an accomplished women's fashion designer and is popular for his program on QVC, this book is more about style than fashion.

That's a good thing because style transcends fashion. As Duke demonstrates in the book, looking good and feeling good about how you look are based on understanding and cultivating personal style rather than being a slave to trends. His advice can help women better understand themselves and their bodies so that they can be more informed about what they wear and more confident about how they wear it.

Beauty on a budget is outlined in "The Thrifty Girl's Guide to Glamour." Click photo for larger image.

"Women who have great style don't all have perfect figures," he writes, "but they do have one thing in common: an intimate knowledge of their body and a clear understanding of what looks good on it. This knowledge lets stylish women select and wear clothes that accentuate their positive features and minimize the aspects of their figures they don't love so much. This, in turn, allows them the freedom and confidence to express their personality through clothes."

The Look is visually engaging, practical and interactive, guiding women from an understanding of their body type and their physical assets to discovering their personal style and building a wardrobe around it.

There are helpful discovery tools, from photo illustrations and diagrams to charts and questionnaires. Particularly valuable are the chapters on "intention dressing" for work, play and glamour. Duke's tone is refreshing -- sympathetic and authoritative rather than preachy and condescending.

American women spend more than $33 billion a year on beauty. That's double the amount spent in 1991, when Allure first hit newsstands. Now the magazine, which specializes in teaching women how to look better for less, has released a hardback book full of the types of tips, tricks and strategies craved by women (and a growing number of men).

The mag's editor and founder, Linda Wells, collaborated with other staff on "Allure: Confessions of a Beauty Editor" (Bulfinch Press, $24.99). The result is a compendium of valuable insight into maintaining lovely and healthy hair, nails, body, facial features and skin.

The book is entertaining, informative and entirely practical, interspersed with bite-size beauty nuggets and numerous step-by-step "beauty school" how-tos such as home bikini waxing, hair blowouts and long-wearing lipstick.

Readers will love the tricks of the trade, which range from the benefits of humidifiers and how to speed the healing of a pimple to more effective use of dirt-cheap hair-styling products and the one anti-aging product people should slather on the backs of their hands every day.

Debunked beauty myths also will be appreciated, whether it's eight glasses of water a day to rehydrate skin, eating Jell-O to get strong nails, using a lip-plumper to expand lip size or believing that anti-perspirant causes cancer.

For women who wonder how celebrities achieve red-carpet-ready looks even on ordinary days, it's about more than good genes. Some of the stars' techniques are revealed in "The Black Book of Hollywood Beauty Secrets" (Plume, $15).

Authors and celebrity journalists Cindy Pearlman and Kym Douglas -- who also is an image consultant on "The View" -- said the process for gleaning information for the purse-size paperback was shockingly simple: They just asked, and celebs and their beauty gurus answered.

Among the scores who spilled the style and beauty beans were Catherine Zeta-Jones, Tyra Banks, Lindsay Lohan, Beyonce Knowles and Charlize Theron. Carmen Electra dishes on body shaving, Pamela Anderson shares a hair-volumizing secret, Sanaa Lathan teaches her "sauna trick," and Melania Trump tells what she used to prevent stretch marks during pregnancy.

There's also advice from a few men. Michael Clarke Duncan tells how he eats healthier, for example, and Usher offers dieting tips for maintaining a lean frame and six-pack abs.

Helena Rubenstein, one of America's most famous and influential beauty gurus, once said: "There are no ugly women -- only lazy ones."

That famous quote is an appropriate inclusion in "The Thrifty Girl's Guide to Glamour: Living the Beautiful Life on Little or No Money" (Polka Dot Press, $14.95) because it sums up what the pink-and-silver paperback aims to help women understand.

Author Susie Galvez, a beauty expert and spa industry consultant, lets readers know how to look like a million dollars on a shoestring budget. Her philosophy is simple: If you can't afford a $100 exfoliating mask, don't despair -- just get thee to the kitchen and whip up a facial smoothie with melon, pineapple and club soda.

The 26-chapter book is divided into five sections: hair, body, skin care, makeup and fashion. The treasure trove of tips is easy to navigate, and indexing makes the book a resource that readers can easily return to time and time again.

Finally, there are two new coffee-table tomes that make handsome conversation pieces as well as interesting reading.

Fragrance lovers will enjoy "Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin" (Rizzoli New York, $85). With a second subtitle "A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present," the 384 pages of fascinating lore, cultural commentary and color photos offer months of reading and perusal. Author Richard Stamelman, a professor of romance languages and comparative literature at Williams College, is at his best when he explores the historical impact of perfumes and the influence of popular culture and art on the development of perfume bottles.

Scores of archival photos and more than 300 pages of history also are components of "Tiffany Pearls" (Abrams, $50) by John Loring, design director at Tiffany. He provides an exhaustive study of the pearl and zeroes in on Tiffany's rich heritage acquiring and selling fabulous pearl jewelry beginning in the mid-1800s. The book manages to prove its assertion that pearls outrank diamonds as "the preferred symbol of wealth, rank and authority."