Mask-Up

I once had a random conversation with a group of friends about make-up, during which I discovered that men’s attitude to it differs greatly from women’s. This led me to a lot of thinking. How little do we know about each other’s perspectives and how many stereotypes dominate our society through media!

I started doing research about beauty and beauty standards. What shapes them? How do they influence our choice? And can there be a society free of standards, where each individual is free to choose how to look not being influenced by other people’s opinions?

However, every new article, short video or documentary I would come across threw me deeper into the controversy of completely different opinions. It seemed that we live in the time full of extremes: on one side of the spectrum there are people obsessed with unrealistic images of glossy beauty and youth, on the other we see radical movements that try not only to get rid of beauty standards but that also attack them in a furious way.

I started to feel I would never be able to formulate my own opinion about how to incorporate beauty aspects into everyday life to a healthy extent, being free from prejudices but not becoming lazy and indifferent about appearance. It was at that time that I unexpectedly met a living example of the controversy in these views and attitudes.

Holly is a beautiful 29-year old girl who is insecure about her appearance. Having had traumatic childhood where an idea about her “unattractiveness” deeply engrained in her brain, she has never been able to overcome it when she grew up. She uses a lot of make-up and does look beautiful, but behind this all lie constant doubts about her appearance and permanent unsatisfaction with what she has.

It seemed to me that she was everything I had come across with in my research. She is a girl that perfectly fits societal beauty standards; she is a girl obsessed with the idea of plastic surgeries and ideal beauty; she is a naturally beautiful girl who actually doesn’t need all these efforts to look attractive; she is a victim of unrealistic expectations society lays upon us in terms of how we look.

She helped me realize that all these aspects are interwoven inseparably in every individual to this or that extent. And not being able to dissect and separate them even in a single person’s life, how can we (or me, as that was my intention) come up with a universal solution of how to make our society healthy and beautiful but not beauty-obsessed?

This interesting controversy that I found in Holly was worth being put on screen. An idea of a documentary with elements of an experiment came then. Why don’t I introduce Holly to my audience and then start this experiment to find out what influences her perception of herself more: people’s opinions, or her own idea of how she looks like? This will help me understand whether insecurities come from within ourselves, or whether society and other people instill that in us. Or maybe both?

Finding the answer intrigued me and shaped the form of the film. What did Holly find out during this experiment, and what conclusion did I come up with as a filmmaker? Mask-Up exposes it just one click away.