First Post - The Body Beautiful !

Well I've really been wanting to start one of these for a while now and have finally got round to doing so ! At the moment I'm overloaded with workload for college so I have no idea what made me decide to start this now. I apologize if I don't post something on this for a while after now, however I will try my best to blog often !

At the moment I've been working on a short project called "The Body Beautiful" as part of my foundation course at college. I decided to look at a skin disorder called "Irritant Contact Dermatitis" which can be caused from using cosmetics. I discovered that under the microscope this skin disorder is something which could easily be seen as "beautiful." I thought this was really interesting as it's a real contrast to the damaging effects it can cause to your skin and how these effects look on the skins surface. What else interested me is how using cosmetic products to cover up "imperfections" and certain things today's society class as not beautiful can actually lead to the body gaining a skin disorder which could cause some real damaging effects and possible cause more significant "imperfections."

Using this idea as a starting point I started experimenting using the images I found of the disorder under the microscope. I thought it would be interesting to display these on faces in some way as obviously the face is one of the main areas of the body which cosmetics are used on. To explore this I came up with the idea of projecting one of the images onto faces using a data projector. I then used photo shop to edit out the rest of the projection in the background of the images. I really like how the first few have turned out (shown below) and I think this could be the start of an interesting body of work.

The media seem to advertise cosmetics without displaying any of the side effects the products can cause (such as Irritant Contact Dermatitis.) For this reason I decided to also experiment using the images I found of the disorder on Cosmetic adverts to show the effects under the surface these products can actually cause. This experimentation so far has included drawing the shapes and patterns from the disorder directly onto cosmetic adverts and also using the images I found of the skin disorder on acetate and placing these over cosmetic adverts which gives quite an interesting effect. (shown below)