Grace Lena
Existing research into dementia care shows that it is often marked by a failure to consider the management of appearance as anything other than a disaggregated set of care tasks (Cohen-Mansfield et al., 2006). There is an overwhelming assumption in policy and practice that the work of maintaining a person's appearance can be easily assumed by another, often to be subsumed within the daily task-oriented, time-pressured routines of care provision (Cohen, 2011, Greener, 2011). Guidelines for good practice in dementia care largely overlook âbody workâ (Twigg, Wolkowitz, Cohen, & Nettleton, 2011) in which the management of appearance is embedded (e.g. NICE-SCIE, 2007), the implication being that this is unskilled work for which little or no training is required. Furthermore, of the still limited discussion of appearance in dementia studies the voices of people with dementia have until now been missing (Ward & Campbell, 2013a). In this paper we present findings from a study that provided an opportunity to open up questions about appearance directly with people with dementia and to explore the meanings it holds.