Second  year of university me and Terri Scott created an activist project  focusing on empowering women with focus points such as, Does natural beauty exist? Do you wear makeup to please yourself? what’s your best look for you? These questions were some key points we wanted to address to make people aware that make up is a power in society today and its used by individuals in different ways. We need to empower women’s beauty, whether its natural or not. Society today, especially for young people is becoming a lot harder. Insecurities, low self esteem is something that more and more young people are growing up with, due to social media, such as, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Children growing up aspire to look the “best”, following celebrity looks and trends, and there is so much pressure on children to look like this perfect image. Slim, pretty face, long hair, etc. Women empowerment is something that comes from being comfortable in yourself, whether that’s with make up or beauty products or not.  

“We need to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves. We have to step up as women and take the lead.”(Marie Claire, 2018)

This quote I found really hits home to me, as the work experience I’ve had with marginalized young people, made me realize that insecurities, low self esteem and lack of confidence has a big role to play in these young peoples lives, and we do as individuals need to learn how to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves. It also gives me knowledge when working with marginalized young people to understand how they feel about the way they look and feel, I can then feed them information on why every individual is different and beautiful in their own way, and encourage them to learn to love themselves.

We created a video, showing ourselves with our every day makeup, too us with a bare face, and then also having other products on our skin to show that make up isn’t the only way to feel beautiful, anything you do to your skin, hair, body that makes you feel amazing is just as empowering.

Reflection on our activist project as a whole

• Trying to focus on one area of beauty and empowerment for women. There is so many routes you can take, when it comes to empowering women,  At first we liked the idea of judgment for women, but thought actually it would be more understanding if we focused on “empowering women” as a whole and what the reality is to beauty, which gave us more to work on.
• Another challenge was how we were going to make this activist project unique and something that no one has done. Many create social media campaigns such as using ‘#’ on twitter, or creating surveys on Facebook etc. Many also perform in towns and streets, but the problem with that is that only the public that were in town that day witness the project, where as social media its on there for everyone to see, people can still access it now, or even in ten years time.
• Something that I thought we created well was the actual choreography, because it represented dance that women create today, its all over music videos, TV, internet etc, and also famous singers for example Beyonce, Rhianna all use this style of dance,  again it made sense to the type of project we wanted.
•  Another thing we would need to think about next time is how to make it more of an activist project, because even though we posted it on social media, we don’t really show a clear intent on how to put it in front of people. Performing it in a large public space could be an idea, such as large cities, so we have a bigger audience.