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The Societal Obsession With Appearance

Rosalie Chase Rosie Chase, Uncategorized

“As technology takes over our lives, body image becomes an obsession […] All day we think about what others see” (Chase et al, 2015).

Chase, R. (2015) Username. [DesignerWork] Lincoln 20 April.
Chase, R. (2015) Designer Work.
From a young age we are exposed to society’s depiction of desirable and presented with unattainable standards of beauty. We are bombarded with photo-shopped women on a daily basis and feel the pressures of achieving the standard of beauty being presented to us. As these standards become more prevalent and persuasive, so does the amount of women and girls with low self-worth. Many believe that feeding women with relentless images of inaccessible beauty is potentially worrying. What we don’t realise is how much these images are being digitally altered. No wonder women are incapable of reaching and achieving these ideals of beauty. “They’re not simply unrealistic, they are physically impossible, and yet those images are internalized as average and beautiful. […] “It’s a profit-driven idea of normal and beautiful that women will spend their lives trying to achieve” even though [they] are aware of how unrealistic these expectations are” (HiddenGrace, 2015).

 In an age of high engagement, how has social media affected our self-image?

With the rise of social media and the ‘selfie, it would appear that we are breeding a generation of narcissistic young people who are obsessed with appearances. Our piece seeks to explore identity, technology and this obsession with idealised beauty. Something that we have discussed at great length is the concept of self-censoring your online identity and only allowing the more desirable and appealing aspects to leak out and make it onto social media platforms.

The opinion of others has been a part of identity development for more than a century. “Now that we can interact with […] thousands of people, we’ve strengthened the impact that others have on our self-value” (Erickson, 2013). Self-image is crucial to us; we rely on others perceptions and appraisals to develop our social self. The thought of us uploading a photo that is anything less than perfect is unimaginable. Therefore every ‘selfie’ is taken with precision. The ‘selfie’ allows us to retake the image until it meets our expectations and then improve upon it by digitally altering to create a more ‘likeable self’ and show a version that we think might be more appealing to people.

Chase, R. (2015) Selfie Post. 24 April. Available from: https://instagram.com/p/13HCWjKCtI/?taken-by=rosiechase_ [Accessed 24 April 2015].
Chase, R. (2015) Selfie Post.
This is something we wish to explore in our piece Username. We want to highlight the increasingly narcissistic society in which we care more about what others think. We also want to highlight the obsessive and meticulous process of taking selfies in order to try and find the perfect image.

Works Cited:

Chase, R. (2015) Username. [DesignerWork] Lincoln 20 April.

Chase, R. (2015) Selfie Post. 24 April. Available from: https://instagram.com/p/13HCWjKCtI/?taken-by=rosiechase_ [Accessed 24 April 2015].

Chase, R., Gudge, C., Hartley, S. and Haynes, H. (2015) Username. Lincoln.

Erickson, C. (2013) The Social Psychology of the Selfie. [online] Available from: http://mashable.com/2013/02/15/social-media-and-the-selfie/ [Accessed 15 April 2015].

HiddenGrace. (2015) Influences of Unrealistic Beauty Ideals in the Media. [online]Available from: https://www.7cupsoftea.com/forum/7CupsofTeaLiteratureClub_67/7CupsofTeaLiteratureESSAYS_266/InfluencesofUnrealisticBeautyIdealsintheMedia_14452/ [Accessed 15 April 2015].

Insecurities, Inspiration & Ideas

Stacey Hartley Stacey Hartley, Uncategorized

Choosing to devise our own piece, we wanted to gather inspiration from other theatre companies and artists occupying a similar concept. We looked into Louise Orwin’s piece Pretty Ugly and discovered the integral relation that she had to her concept. Orwin underwent a yearlong experiment, ‘liv[ing] online as three teenage alter-egos’ (Orwin, 2014), asking online strangers to rate her appearances. From this experiment, Orwin created a performance that had real lived-in moments that she experienced firsthand. We took this element as inspiration and proceeded with an in depth discussion about our own experience with our concept.

Firstly, with our performance based on our own ideas of online identities, we had to look at the ways in which we update our individual online profiles. Our first revelation was the large amount of selfies we take before uploading just one to social media. However, before uploading, that particular ‘perfect’ selfie needs a filter and editing, which results in an altered image which does not truthfully represent the person behind it.

Our discussion lead to the process of the selfie, and we dissected it to understand each other’s method as well as our own. A few of us have watch videos on YouTube and have researched makeup tutorials in order to enhance and better their look. We found a contouring tutorial on YouTube and chose the one with the most views to see how the mass have attempted to contour their faces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dLSy75M46o

Contouring has become more and more popular and through these makeup tutorials, girls can contour their faces similar to their idols and celebrities. For example, this particular video is inspired by Kim Kardashian and is an attempt to create her look through contouring. We used this tutorial and tried it out ourselves and began to control the way our faces looked, such as a slimmer nose, slimmer cheeks, highlighted eyes, etc.

This lead the discussion to body image and how we feel about our own bodies in regards to the media. It seems that all four of us, including Orwin had noticed that ‘advertisments, magazines, film and television had been spoon-feeding images of unattainable ‘perfection’’ (Orwin, 2013). Although we do not want to focus on this too much, it has inspired us to use voice over to represent that the media and technology is still controlling the way we look.

We then discussed personal routines. Whilst just simply finding out more about each other and laughing about the silly things we do whilst getting ready, it seemed like all of us have the same problem. What do we wear? After frantically changing outfits many times, adjusting hair and makeup, whilst getting frustrated in the process, we thought this may be a good way for our piece to go. We all feel connected with this concept, and therefore, the performance will hopefully reflect our audience’s relation to their image and get a sense of our individual personalities within our company.

Another inspiration for our piece is comedian, Jena Kingsley, and in particular, her experiment on social networking in real life. Kingsley takes all things social media such as, poking, liking, commenting, etc, and brings them out in to reality.

This experiment tests boundaries of unsuspected people and determines that social media language and actions are seen as bizarre behaviour, yet it is acceptable behind the guard of their online persona. Although this piece is literally based on bringing social media to life, we feel that the idea of using social media names would stress the online influences in our performance. For example, we are going to take names from twitter for each of the actors, such as, @Harriet_Haynes, which will be read as ‘at Harriet underscore Haynes’.

 

Works cited:

GlamBooth TV. (2014) Contouring & Highlighting- Kim Kardashian’s Makeup secret!. [online video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dLSy75M46o [Accessed 10th April 2015].

Kingsley, J. (2015) Social Networking in Real Life -Social Experiment. [online video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pyJlERCrJE [Accessed 13th April 2015].

Orwin, L. (2013) Pretty Ugly: About the Project. [online] Available from: https://prettyorugly.wordpress.com/about-the-project/ [Accessed 21st March 2015].

Orwin, L. (2014) Louise Orwin: Pretty Ugly. [online] Available from: http://www.louiseorwin.com/pretty-ugly [Accessed 20th March 2015].

 

Stacey Hartley – Stage Manager