She drank so many chocolate diet shakes she constipated herself. She tried to scrub cystic acne off her back with an abrasive foot pumice. She once broke in a pair of uncomfortable high heels by wearing them with hiking socks and jogging around a parking lot. After her first baby was born and her weight didn’t come off as fast as online forums promised, she wore a spandex corset five hours a day.

Hyde had been a cultural anthropology major at an Ivy League college, trained to recognize self-destructive and ritualistic behavior in other cultures. But when it came to what she calls her own “beauty craziness,” she couldn’t fight back. It got worse when, at 31, she moved with her new husband to hyper-fashion-conscious Hong Kong. Disoriented and feeling like a marginalized expat, she resorted to retail therapy, shopping incessantly, trying all the expensive samples at the cosmetics counters, changing her jewelry constantly, and having “a lot of mirror meltdowns,” Hyde said. When she went to the hospital to have her baby, she brought along mascara.

One winter day in 2007, she caught sight of herself in a fancy shop window. To her horror, the woman who stared back was an exhausted young mother, decidedly ugly and utterly beyond hope. “A little inner voice said to me, ‘You look like crap!’,” said Hyde, who is anything but ugly, and now lives in Brookline with her husband and two children, ages 6 and 3. “That was the day I said, this is absurd.”

It was also the day she decided to swear off beauty — for a year. That meant no new clothes and jewelry. No more expensive salon haircuts, just a simple, short cut like a man’s. She tossed her makeup, night cream, hair mousse, razors, and nail polish, and packed away her blow dryer, hairbrush, and 38 pairs of earrings. She covered up the mirrors of her apartment.

Hyde chronicled her experience of living “outside of the sucking black hole of consumerist desire“ in a new book, “The Beauty Experiment” (Da Capo Lifelong Books), which will be published Dec. 25.

The book is part coming-of-age story, part field study, and while Hyde acknowledges the experiment didn’t fully cure her, the woman at the end of the experiment was different than the one who started it. Today, she said, she is a woman “who finally knows how to respond with wisdom and compassion to the voice of beauty craziness in her head.”

She’s a woman who, five years post-experiment, answers the door of her home wearing no makeup, jeans, Birkenstock sandals with socks, and an Indian-style tunic that she said was “edging toward the five-year mark.” It’s hard to believe this petite, fair-skinned, and animated strawberry blonde ever thought of herself as ugly. But such is the power of a consumer-driven world, she writes, “where culture, gender, and economic identities are as jumbled up as junk in a messy purse.”

Hyde’s father was a hotel manager who was transferred frequently, and she grew up all over the country including, from third to eighth grade, a dude ranch in Arizona. Hyde has a visual autobiographical memory, and her childhood recollections surface less as a series of anecdotes than a progression of fashion images. She recalls Vulture Peak Middle School in Arizona as an enclave of girls wearing skin-tight Wrangler jeans and blue eyeliner. She attended boarding school in Connecticut where girls had “straight blond hair . . . and wore very little makeup and extremely expensive winter coats.”

But her first inkling of the outsize role that fashion and materialism can play in the formation of women’s identities came when Hyde was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, spending a semester abroad in Cameroon. She was in a market and saw a shoeless young girl standing in the dust, staring at a vendor’s secondhand Western fashion magazines.

“What upset me was that Glamour, Paris Match, and OK were the girl’s primary connection to Western women, this barefoot, slum-dwelling school-age girl living in a country plagued by AIDS, dysentery, government corruption, nonexistent health care, and rampant witch doctoring,” Hyde writes in her book.