Beauty Tips
For this action, I attended the event at the gallery "transformed" according to the beauty tips that I found in magazines and internet in publications targeting young womxn.
It took me over two hours to be ready, in that time: I cover my tattoos and scars with makeup, I wore a corset to sharpen my waist, special panties to up my glutes, a belt to hide my belly, anti-Cellulite tights, a push-up bra with pads to fill my breast and eleven centimetres heels. I wore a wig because I didn't find hair extensions with the same colour as my hair; I painted my nails and hid my circles, facial marks and wrinkles, highlight eyebrows, etc.
At some point in the event, I walked into the centre of the room, propped with a table, chair and makeup remover utensils. I started slowly to take off the clothes and remove my makeup until it was just me in front of the crowd. Until that moment, nobody suspected that I wasn't real.
I took many selfies that I was uploading to the internet (under a fake account), I received a friend request, invitations to "date", and sex. All these online interactions stopped when I started to reveal online my self under the costume.
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This ritual of constructing and reconstructing the normative female image by makeup and clothes is deeply rooted in ourselves, especially in Western culture. I witness how young womxn just integrate this dogma almost every day without asking themselves once why, or even who is the judge of their image or for whom they do it.
It feels like this everydayness, plus the trendy filters used to embellish our social media images, is repeating the dangerous message that you are not ok; you need to be fixed. So it is only when we feel "safe" in the loneliness of our home, when we remove the makeup-armour, because being natural, being ourselves, we feel vulnerable and fragile.
I'm not claiming or not a natural appearance; we are "constructed" creatures. The artificiality and ornamentation is part of what we are, but we should be aware of the reasons that lead us to build our image and their consequences.
It took me over two hours to be ready, in that time: I cover my tattoos and scars with makeup, I wore a corset to sharpen my waist, special panties to up my glutes, a belt to hide my belly, anti-Cellulite tights, a push-up bra with pads to fill my breast and eleven centimetres heels. I wore a wig because I didn't find hair extensions with the same colour as my hair; I painted my nails and hid my circles, facial marks and wrinkles, highlight eyebrows, etc.
At some point in the event, I walked into the centre of the room, propped with a table, chair and makeup remover utensils. I started slowly to take off the clothes and remove my makeup until it was just me in front of the crowd. Until that moment, nobody suspected that I wasn't real.
I took many selfies that I was uploading to the internet (under a fake account), I received a friend request, invitations to "date", and sex. All these online interactions stopped when I started to reveal online my self under the costume.
This ritual of constructing and reconstructing the normative female image by makeup and clothes is deeply rooted in ourselves, especially in Western culture. I witness how young womxn just integrate this dogma almost every day without asking themselves once why, or even who is the judge of their image or for whom they do it.
It feels like this everydayness, plus the trendy filters used to embellish our social media images, is repeating the dangerous message that you are not ok; you need to be fixed. So it is only when we feel "safe" in the loneliness of our home, when we remove the makeup-armour, because being natural, being ourselves, we feel vulnerable and fragile.
I'm not claiming or not a natural appearance; we are "constructed" creatures. The artificiality and ornamentation is part of what we are, but we should be aware of the reasons that lead us to build our image and their consequences.
