When engaged in a long-term relationship, you’ll eventually get to the point where it feels like there’s nothing you don’t know about each other. As this hilarious video shows, however, you may not even be that aware of what your partner even looks like.
This video from Rohan Dhillon comes across as a playful look at various women acting shy in front of the camera. But when the focus shifts to outgoing, happy young girls, a more profound question emerges: “When did you stop thinking you’re beautiful?”
Loving someone with all your heart is a big part of what makes life worth living. Unfortunately, it comes at a cost. This beautiful video from Jason Silva explores what it means to be in love, why that makes you so sad, and what you can do about it.
In a recent article for Refinery29, Elna Baker shared her personal experience with extreme weight loss and the mental and physical impact it had on her. Baker was overweight most of her life and, at her heaviest, weighed 265 pounds. By her mid-20s she had enough and lost 110 pounds. After she accomplished something she “never thought was possible” Baker was still unhappy, but for a completely different reason: her skin. It sagged from her now-thin frame and no matter how she tried to tuck it away or make it vanish with lotions and exercise, it still sagged. “The Before and After pictures you see on billboards—they’re a lie,” Baker says. “After dropping my weight, I had so much extra skin that I could lay on my side and pull it a half-foot in either direction.”
Baker would have four surgeries to remove the excess skin and turn her into the person she wanted to see in the “After” picture. She got implants the size of her old breasts and a body lift. Two years later, she went in for a circumferential body lift. “They made an incision around my entire waist, cut out a 6-inch belt of skin, and then sewed me back together, removing ten pounds of skin altogether… Now I have a scar that runs completely around my waist, as if a magician cut me in half.”
Here’s how Baker looked after the surgery:
You could imagine how she felt when recently, her boyfriend invited her to a “spa retreat” in Big Sur, California that included a naked bath. After years of feeling insecure about her weight and then years of continuous surgeries to repair her body, a naked spa was the last thing Baker wanted to hop into. The spa was filled with “the types of people you’d see in an advanced Yoga class in LA,” Baker said. But she bravely entered the spa. After ten minutes, she excused herself to a solo bath. The next day, she reflected on how powerful it was to confront her fears and came to a revelation. “I can see my body however I want to. I choose to dislike it. And I do because after all these years, disliking the way I look has become part of my identity. Instead of owning my body, I let the world tell me who I’m supposed to be and how I’m supposed to look.”
You can see more of photographer Jessica Peterson’s work here.
(Original story written by Tod Perry for our partners at GOOD)
The bizarre story of how a Taiwanese model found herself the star of one the Internet’s most popular memes spread online like wildfire. The root of the tale is based on how differently cultures view the concept of beauty and of themselves.
The story begins a few years ago, when things were going pretty well for Taiwanese model Heidi Yeh. After taking small job posing in an ad for a South Korean plastic surgery company, however, everything changed.
The ad featured an attractive couple with three children who had something noticeably different about their appearance — their eyelids were Photoshopped.
“The only thing you’ll have to worry about,” the ad read. “Is how to explain it to the kids.”
While double eyelid surgery is common for affluent people in Asian countries (it’s done to give them a “Western” look, Yeh herself never had the procedure done. But that didn’t stop the Internet from giving that ad a horrible life of its own. The photo, widely circulated online, viciously mocked the model.
People made up a story about the woman in the photo and spread it on the internet,” Yeh said. “They said her husband figured out she had lied to him about not having plastic had surgery done … [the kids] didn’t look anything like her. Then he sued her and won.”
The meme became so widespread that soon even her family and close friends quizzed her about it.
“When a friend told me about this I thought it was just rumors. Then I realized the whole world was spreading the story and in different languages,” she said. “People actually believed it and thought this had happened to me. Even my relatives and fiance’s family have asked me about it.”
Yeh shared with the BBC what a terrible impact the whole thing has had on her career and life. “I decided to speak out because I wanted to give myself some courage to deal with this problem,” she said. “People refuse to believe that I have never had plastic surgery. After this, I only got small roles in advertisements. Because of this, I haven’t been able to sleep well and have broken down many times crying.”
The model is currently suing the ad agency, J. Walter Thompson (JWT), to recoup losses she claims the ad has caused. She’s also going after a cosmetic clinic that used the photo for an online ad campaign, one that may have been the biggest force in the meme becoming so popular.
The bizarre story of how a Taiwanese model found herself the star of one the Internet’s most popular memes spread online like wildfire. The root of the tale is based on how differently cultures view the concept of beauty and of themselves.
The story begins a few years ago, when things were going pretty well for Taiwanese model Heidi Yeh. After taking small job posing in an ad for a South Korean plastic surgery company, however, everything changed.
The ad featured an attractive couple with three children who had something noticeably different about their appearance — their eyelids were Photoshopped.
“The only thing you’ll have to worry about,” the ad read. “Is how to explain it to the kids.”
While double eyelid surgery is common for affluent people in Asian countries (it’s done to give them a “Western” look, Yeh herself never had the procedure done. But that didn’t stop the Internet from giving that ad a horrible life of its own. The photo, widely circulated online, viciously mocked the model.
People made up a story about the woman in the photo and spread it on the internet,” Yeh said. “They said her husband figured out she had lied to him about not having plastic had surgery done … [the kids] didn’t look anything like her. Then he sued her and won.”
The meme became so widespread that soon even her family and close friends quizzed her about it.
“When a friend told me about this I thought it was just rumors. Then I realized the whole world was spreading the story and in different languages,” she said. “People actually believed it and thought this had happened to me. Even my relatives and fiance’s family have asked me about it.”
Yeh shared with the BBC what a terrible impact the whole thing has had on her career and life. “I decided to speak out because I wanted to give myself some courage to deal with this problem,” she said. “People refuse to believe that I have never had plastic surgery. After this, I only got small roles in advertisements. Because of this, I haven’t been able to sleep well and have broken down many times crying.”
The model is currently suing the ad agency, J. Walter Thompson (JWT), to recoup losses she claims the ad has caused. She’s also going after a cosmetic clinic that used the photo for an online ad campaign, one that may have been the biggest force in the meme becoming so popular.
What the “perfect body” looks like varies greatly from country to country. Superdrug Online Doctors created a project called “Perceptions of Perfection” to highlight the different views of beauty from 18 different countries. They hired a designer from each of the countries included and had them all photoshop the same image to reflect the beauty standards of each country.
The series starts with the “original” photo and changes drastically from there.
(Original story written by Craig Carilli for our partners at GOOD)
