Terms & Conditions

Terms & Conditions is a series of colorized photographs and collages that interpret the relationship between social media use, the negative implications of excessive e-consumerism in beauty markets, and the Internet’s obsession with the pursuit of beauty. Through this series, I am reflecting on the continuous trend cycle that colored my early online experiences and its now pervasive influence on mass media both online and offline. By photographing and collaging my own beauty products, I am identifying myself as an active participant in the mania of trend-following. Thus, Terms & Conditions functions as the self-reflective examination of an insider and not a detached critical response. I experiment with the rules of advertising photography as a way to situate this work as an analog to the e-beauty market. In order to subvert these conventions, I digitally colorize and collage my black-and-white photographs. These interventions mimic the highly constructed nature of online identity and reinterpret the beauty product as an idol to be worshipped or feared.

The tactility of beauty ritualism is often not represented in the advertising and influencer-made media used to promote specific products. When using these products, I am applying liquids and creams, tweezing and microblading the hair from my face, and bonding mink eyelashes to my own to hide the natural ones.

This metamorphosis of the physical self is all done in my pursuit of beauty. Beauty is marketed as a polished, clean surface, like that of the cold mirror I stare into in the mornings, yet to get to beauty as a state of being I put my body through processes that feel more like a scientific experiment.

Sometimes I think of Dr. Frankenstein sewing together his monster as I tweeze and tweeze and tweeze to make sure my eyebrows are as close to symmetrical as humanly possible.

These experiments, rituals, or routines feel both human and inhuman. To feel like myself, I situate myself in these various routines, yet these routines further remove myself from my natural state of being.

If I don’t tweeze my eyebrows they connect in the middle, like caterpillars creeping slowly towards one another in a strange mating dance. My hair after a shower covers my whole bathroom and sticks to my body; slick, wet, and tangled like one of the monsters I feared was under my bed when I was a child. I always quickly apply the goop I purchased from the drugstore around the corner in order to tame it, to make it not feel so strangling.

I compare my reflection to the women I see in my phone. They feel like my enemies but the amount of time we spend together makes them my closest companions. I stare in something like awe, wonder, jealousy, disgust as they tell me more ways I can be pretty, more things I can buy to fast track my path to pretty. I frown at my box dyed hair in the mirror;

I wish I was born blonde.

( x 2022 - x present )

I Am, I Am, I Am (2024) with Artist Arrietta van der Voort

Engaging in the Fine Print with Nora Benjamin, essay by Artist Meg Duguid