As preparations for my graduation project, I researched the dark side of the Beauty industry. For one and a half years I read books and articles and watched documentaries on the topic. I took everything in that I could find to try to understand what happens, when unrealistic beauty standards are forced upon us constantly and ended up seeing things I would have not expected to be connected to an industry that just seems to sell make-up and clothes.
Did you know that human trafficking rings are rooted in the model industry? Girls, as young as 12 years, from country’s like Siberia are brought to far off locations while being promised to work there as models and earn enough money to be able to help their families back home. In truth they are often bound to slave contracts. Unable to leave the situation, stuck in a foreign country with no way to return to their families. Many of them end up as labour slaves or in (forced) prostitution. Very few of these girls actually make a career in modeling.
Adult women then try to look like photoshopped children from the magazines and sometimes enhace themselves with drastic measures. I learned that your lips can burst when too much filler is injected into them. And when too much botox is injected into your face tissue to erase wrinkles, it paralyzes muscles that control our micro mimics. Your face is then not able to mirror other faces anymore. Meaning you are unable to read their emotions still.
When I started this project I was convinced I could handle the information and the visual and mental impact of the research. But I was wrong, I felt miserable after the project was done for a long time. I had confronted myself with facts about subjects like eating disorders, extreme body enhancements, human trafficking and child porn for over a year. The beauty industry is undeniably intertwined with all of these.
It is an industry that exists, not to make us feel better, but to make us feel worse. Because when we feel unhappy, that’s when we spend money on products that promise to make us feel good. To emphasize the atrocities that are part of the beauty industry I called my installation Diktatur der Schönheit. Visible on the outside are high-fashion like pictures on one, and a grotesque female portrait on the other side. On the inside there’s a collage of disturbing images I made during the research.
