"Prettier If"
“Oh, you’d be so much prettier if you just...” is the beginning of a phrase all women know only too well. It’s meant as a sort of backhanded compliment or an attempt at a helpful critique. However, rather than being helpful it’s a reminder that to society even if you’re pretty it’s never enough. For my thesis I wanted to take a deeper look at societal beauty norms and empower women to overcome what society says they should look like. Through my portrait series I show women of different ethnicity, age groups, and body types embracing whatever society, friends, family, or even they themselves have said would make them more beautiful if they could change it. I also explore how society as a whole tells women to change pieces of themselves to fit into this skewed beauty standard we have created through an info graphic based on a survey I compiled and my two motion graphics “The Ideal Woman” and “The Duality of Beauty.”
