Blog Post 2
The three Better Lives themes are: Sustainability, Diversity, and Social Responsibility. These themes have become more crucial in the recent years in a lot of different fields. As a student in the Hair, Make-up and Prosthetics for Performance course, there’s a lot of issues in the cosmetology industry that could still be improved, that being said, the industry has come a long way in just the last couple centuries.
The better lives theme of ‘“sustainability” is not really very prominent in terms of the products being created, a lot of make-up companies use animal testing (even though this is slowly changing), they focus more on health and safety, and being sanitary. That being said, there are a lot more companies trying to become more sustainable, a couple of examples might be: L’Oreal, Circumference and Rituals.
The theme of “diversity” has slowly become more prominent in the make-up industry in the last couple decades, this can be seen by cosmetics companies creating more shades of concealers and foundations for women with darker complexions as well as a wider range of representations in advertisements. That being said, there are still issues in some places, an example of this is natural hair discrimination, this forced independent natural hair companies to start competing with larger corporate companies. As a Hair and make-up artist, we should be able to work on anybody’s hair no matter their ethnicity or the quality of the individual’s hair.
There are a lot of brands and companies to choose from when buying skincare products or cosmetics products, some of these companies are animal cruelty free, environmentally friendly and they dont take “short cuts”. This could often mean these products might be a little more pricey. In the more recent years the amount of people being socially responsible has increased but it’s important to bear in mind that due to poverty, some might not be able to afford the expensive products (they can still make more socially responsible decisions in different ways).
The Better Lives project I am part of is “Mask Making and Politics”; all of the better lives themes can be applied to the project as masks are used for all sorts of purposes, ranging from rituals and ceremonies to medical reasons to political protests. There’s also so many different ways to go about creating a mask, with a lot of different sustainable materials that can be used such as paper mache, wax or clay.