Name: What does it mean to be beautiful? | Esther Honig | TEDxVancouver
Uploaded: 2018-07-03T06:38:39.000Z
Duration: 12 min 25 s
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so I stepped away from my career in journalism

It was six months of dull meaningless labor,

but that's where I was first introduced to this amazing website called Fiber.

And Fiber is an international freelance website

where you can contract people from all over the world

to do things like animation, graphic design, video editing.

And one day, while I was supposed to be working at this boring desk job,

I was actually looking through the Fiber website,

and that's when I came across this page full of photo editors.

And these are people from all over the world,

places like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Greece.

And they were saying things like "I can make your image perfect."

My oldest sister always says that really good ideas are simple.

And in that moment, I decided that what I wanted to do

where I was wearing no makeup and had no fancy lighting,

and I was going to send it to these photo editors

Because I had no idea how this sort of experiment would turn out,

but I hypothesized that my request would be interpreted very differently,

depending on the individual and the culture that they'd grown up in.

So, I sent my image to over 50 photo editors

And as the edited images began arriving in my inbox,

this really weird idea I had started to get really interesting.

People had changed the color of my skin to be lighter or darker.

They'd shave down my eyebrows to be pencil thin or thick and bushy.

but in the end, I still didn't have any concrete idea what this project meant.

I couldn't spot any consistencies or patterns,

regardless of where the photo editor was from.

And so for a moment I considered this sort of DIY social experiment

But I thought, you know, the concept is interesting,

and I felt that it provoked a really important dialogue.

someone somewhere out there is going to want to see this.

So I titled it "Before and After" and I sent it to BuzzFeed,

on the chance that "Hey, maybe they'd consider publishing it."

and I thought, "Great, published by BuzzFeed; check that off the list."

something completely unexplainable and unpredictable

And not 30 minutes after that article went live

from an editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, asking to publish Before and After.

under the tsunami of fan mail and media requests

I'm interviewed on CNN, Al Jazeera, Good Morning America, The Today Show.

And they're all asking the same question:

"What does this mean? What does this project mean?"

You know, I wish so badly that I had this PhD in anthropology or something

so that I could give some definitive answer

and my job is really all about asking questions.

Personally, I think that the results of Before and After are thought-provoking.

You know, this project doesn't define beauty

In fact, the most significant thing that this project did

around something that we think about and experience every day

The moment that Before and After officially went viral,

I started getting these Photoshopped images of myself

"Oh, I noticed you didn't have a photo from my country"

want to be a part of my collection, and at first, that's so flattering.

But after like the 500th image, it all starts to feel a bit invasive.

You know, like my face has become this global paint-by-numbers project.

And it's even used without my permission in things like online ads

It's not uncommon that creators lose control of their work when it goes viral,

and I'd become a part of the public domain.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

What does it mean to be beautiful? | Esther Honig | TEDxVancouver

perspective

sort

significant

compelling