UNNAMED- The Future of Beauty
Sara Trudan, Erin Migneco, and Clio Maxwell
The Goal: To create a magazine that reframes how we think of and capture beauty
General Introduction
A recurring theme in current media is that people in magazines are only portrayed through their stereotypically beautiful physical features. Our goal and vision are to change that. In the future, we picture a world that showcases people in magazines through something other than their physical appearance. Highlighting a person’s quirks, goals, personality traits, talents, and hobbies should be considered beautiful, too. As this project developed, we quickly realized that beauty means something different to everyone. All people see beauty in a different way, and we want this magazine to highlight that. Collaborating with each subject and asking them how they want to be portrayed helps them express their personalities in the exact way they want to be represented.
Every person who reads magazines can understand the issues that come with these highly photoshopped covers and pages. As young children, we see photos of perfectly altered bodies and begin to build in our head what it means to be beautiful (Grabe, S., Ward, L. M., & Hyde, J. S., 2008). We compare our own bodies to these images of “beauty” and compare what is different and what is often unattainable. This unhealthy mindset can impact a person’s idea of their own self-worth- all from just a picture! This has recently even extended to social media as well and threatens the psychological and mental well-being of audiences who are conditioned to view themselves only in comparison to what the current standard of beauty is at the time (Mills, J.S., Shannon, A., Hogue, J., 2017). This is why the alternative of showcasing talents, passions, and quirks is so important. These things are just as beautiful and should not be ignored. (Vandenbosch, L., & Eggermont, S., 2012). The way people present themselves on social media is often focused on casting their beauty and their life in the best light. This idea is talked about at length in the article, The construction of self in social medias, such as Facebook (Hilsen, A. I., 2012). We do not want to simply create another platform in which people do this. We want an alternative magazine that will showcase them for who they are, not the facade of which they feel they must project.
Project Introduction
Our goal for this project was to redefine how we think of the beauty of people to include their personality traits, quirks, talents, passions, and sense of humor. The traditional focus on beauty is typically on facial symmetry, body type, and other aspects of physical appearance. We want our magazine to be one step of many to reframe this thinking of beauty into one that values humans for who they really are, not arbitrary beauty standards. Our magazine, Unnamed, features people as to how they want to be perceived based on the characteristics and interests they value. Instead of naming these people, we titled their page with the one word that they think captures their inner beauty most, i.e. adventurous, intelligent, or bold. The structure of the page, design layout, words, and colors all contribute to the uniqueness of each person’s page and how it relates to their personal beauty. Imagining an alternative definition of beauty is important because it can be damaging to perceive beauty solely as the physical aspects of yourself that you have little control over or those which will eventually fade. One source we drew from was the scholarly article Self, Identity, Stress, and Mental Health by Peggy A. Thoits. We wanted to explore in what ways we think of ourselves and how this affects our mental health and our self-esteem. Instead of basing how we think about ourselves in a way so criticized by society like physical beauty, we propose thinking about ourselves in ways more associated with things we like, our personalities, and our interests (Thoits, P. A., 2013). We wanted our definition of beauty to capture the essence of each person’s personality or characteristics they think are important.
Project Media
Take a look at our full magazine!
Related Work
Our source of inspiration for this project came from the work done by Katherine Young, a graphic designer, in redesigning the cover of Girls’ Life magazine (Young, K. 2016). In her efforts to highlight and change the sexist and superficial themes surrounding these magazines for teens, Katherine Young was hoping to make these types of magazines and their covers into sources of inspiration for others, not envy. Our own work was heavily influenced by the work of Katherine Young, though we had redesigned it fundamentally to depict the aspects of beauty people have that are not on the surface level (like what is depicted on the covers of magazines such as Girls’ Life).
Another resource we had used was an article from 2014 titled “Capturing personality from Facebook photos and photo-related activities: How much exposure do you need?” (Eftekhar, A., Fullwood, C., Morris, N., 2014). This article focused on how people depict themselves on their own social media accounts and user bios and how influences may contribute. Much like this project, this gives full reigns to the user in how they will be seen by others, but our project takes away the influence and pressures involved in maintaining a social media presence and instead focuses solely on the features and characteristics of the individual that they deem important to themselves.
Another source of inspiration was More Than a Body’s article about Photoshop in the media (Photoshopping: Altering Images and Our Minds, 2014). This article exposes countless times that people, especially women, were edited for magazine covers to look slimmer, fitter, and smoother. Editors were defining their worth through their bodies only and failing to consider any other characteristics. Examples with Britney Spears and Kelly Clarkson were highlighted, amplifying the fact that women in media are often exposed to show their physical characteristics while ignoring their talents.
In a New York Times article, the author describes how there is a current need for authenticity (Wilson, E.,2009). Articles that include celebrities with little to no makeup seem refreshing and empowering. This is a step in the right direction to a world without photoshop, showcasing that imperfections of the human body are beautiful, too.
One resource that emphasizes the degree to which traditional standards of beauty strains our perceptions of ourselves and our mental health is the video, Women get Photoshopped into Cultural Beauty Standards. The women in the video had their bodies altered to resemble the bodies that are often shown in magazines as the ideal beauty standard (As/Is., 2017). This video shows how important it is to reimagine an alternative magazine in which there is authenticity and a focus on beauty as the characteristics that matter.
Process
Based on our earlier discussions regarding representation in the media and how that differs across cultures and genders, our group wanted to depict a future where physical features did not have anything to do with one’s beauty. The issues of body image, dysmorphia, beauty standards, sexism, and racism were covered in our early discussions, which lead us to discuss how someone’s personality and accomplishments were much more beautiful. We were inspired by a graphic designer who had redesigned the cover of Girls’ Life and had taken to doing a similar task of depicting a person’s beauty in a visual way on Canva by making “mood boards” for each person. We each asked 2–3 people of very different backgrounds to think of ways to represent their “inner beauty” through photos, words, and colors that match who they are. It was a very difficult and abstract concept to be asking, as more often than not there is still the inner desire to show the idealistic version of ourselves, but after creating our own “Authors’ Pages”, it became easier to depict what could be done for each individual through Canva. We made this into a zine in direct opposition to the contemporary magazines that skew public opinion about what beauty really is. Each person interviewed worked closely with us to create a page or two representing their version of beauty to be added as another chapter in our zine with a title that the individual saw fit themselves. We each worked on Canva to develop our individual pages of the zine and planned to print it out to a physical medium, as well as develop it for an online format through Adobe Spark.
Footer Text
In the course Multimedia Production and Digital Culture, our class has reimagined alternative universes embedding various different mediums and objectives. Take a look at the links provided below.
Anna Roberds, Charles Walker & Grace Sieck, ENVI Magazine
Madison Callahan, Addy Holmes, & Logan Ray, Are You Getting This Mockumentary
Parker Mitchell, Drew Hickland, and Maura Estes, NC Sta-y with the times,
Ray Youman, Adam Suddarth, and Matt Norris, Movement of the Future: Piezoelectricity:
References
As/Is. (2017, January 29). Women Get Photoshopped Into Cultural Beauty Standards, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwLGb5RDcG0
Eftekhar, A., Fullwood, C., Morris, N. (2014) Capturing personality from Facebook photos and photo-related activities: How much exposure do you need? Elsevier, 37, 162–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.04.048.
Grabe, S., Ward, L. M., & Hyde, J. S. (2008). The Role of the Media in Body Image Concerns Among Women: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental and Correlational Studies. Psychological Bulletin , 134(3), 460–476.
Hilsen, A. I. (2012). The construction of self in social medias, such as Facebook. Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication, 29(3–10).
Mills, J.S., Shannon, A., Hogue, J. (2017). Beauty, Body Image, and the Media. Perceptions of Beauty. IntechOpen. DOI: 10.5772/66021.
Photoshopping: Altering Images and Our Minds. (2014, March 12). More Than a Body. https://www.morethanabody.org/photoshopping-altering-images-and-our-minds/
Thoits, P. A. (2013). Self, Identity, Stress, and Mental Health. Handbook of the Sociology of Mental Health, 357–377.
Vandenbosch, L., & Eggermont, S. (2012). Understanding Sexual Objectification: A Comprehensive Approach Toward Media Exposure and Girls’ Internalization of Beauty Ideals, Self‐Objectification, and Body Surveillance. Journal of Communication, 62(5), 869–887.
Wilson, E. (2009, May). Smile and Say “No Photoshop.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/fashion/28RETOUCH.html
Young, K. (2016, Sept 7). Girls’ Life… We Need to Do Better. Katherine Young Creative, https://www.katherineyoungcreative.com/blog/2016/9/7/girls-life-we-need-to-do-better.
