Chemical Make-Up is a video striving to shed light on
makeup’s power in society, and bring attention to women’s ritual to abstract
and cover her face, rather than pressure my audience to feel a certain way
about makeup. Although makeup is a part
of so many people’s daily lives, I feel like many people do not bother to
consider beauty’s pervasive influence, and do not consider that the reason they
are applying makeup may be due to subconscious societal pressures felt since
birth. We may experience the pressure of
not feeling “beautiful enough” with media serving as a constant reminder of
today’s standards of beauty, but I do not think we recognize how far we will
go. The audience is allowed to process
this information, and then decide on their own how they feel about the subject.
The makeup gains a personality of its own in the video, since I chose not to
photograph the act of using my hands to apply the makeup, giving the illusion
that it’s applying itself. I found my
sound through a collection of tutorials, celebrity interviews, makeup
commercials and gossip TV, such as Fashion Police. Each serves an important purpose
individually, but together, all of them point to the idealized and glitzy
people society defines as beautiful. For
example, it was important to me to include makeup commercials and interviews
with celebrities about their makeup routines, because we idolize them. Even though Hollywood and magazines are known
for being fabricated, airbrushed worlds, we try to bring that into our own
lives, so this video focuses on what makeup covers up. The sound includes people from multiple
countries and multiple generations, and in most cases, there is a dialogue
between the sound clips that symbolizes recycled beauty ideas since makeup’s
conception.
The video’s indoor
apartment setting served to imitate a common setting for makeup tutorials. But I was careful to keep every surface
(wall, table) empty to create a formal environment that echoes a staged
photograph or painting in a studio, which is reinforced by the video’s use of
still images. The still-images and stationary camera angle provides a timeline
from the beginning of the look, to after the makeup’s removal. The viewer can observe the change in face
shape and posture, but the passage of time and changing light is especially
noticeable through photographs. The
beginning of the video has an abundance of natural light, but the light is
yellow by the end. The sunset and I
gradually turned on more lights in my room, the increasingly artificial light
mirroring the increasingly artificial face. I chose to call it Chemical Make-Up
to play on the idea of the chemicals we are naturally made-up of and the
chemicals we smear on our face in the form of make-up.
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