Project outcomes and personal development reflection

For the Better Lives project, I chose Makeup Breakdown course. Out of online courses, the themes of the final project are fashion mistakes, imperfection and color theory. Thinking of my minimal makeup skills, I chose fashion mistakes and imperfection as the themes of my final project.

For fashion mistakes, as a fashion styling student, it is familiar for me, even for those who are in fashion industry. Mistakes are common in this filed since thousands of people keep finding mistakes in every experiment in order to perfect their creations. It is impossible to go through life without making mistakes and is not bad to make a mistake, on the contrary, there is much to be learned from wrong reflection. These points of views are also suitable for makeup. I am still a makeup learner and it is not uncommon for me to make technical mistakes. For example, I used to make my eyebrows look very thick by using dark color eyebrows pencil and often overuse shading powder in order to make my features look more three-dimension. Meanwhile, I have to talk about another theme – imperfection to explain the existence of these mistakes. It is well known that compared with Europeans and Americans, most Asians have flat features and yellowish skin, including me. The trend now is that in some Asian countries especially in China, most girls take fair and unblemished skin as the standard of beauty. Due to my dark complexion and acne marks, I felt insecure and unconfident when I was a teenager. Therefore, I bought bright color foundations that didn’t match my skin tone so as to have fair skin. Every time I put on makeup, I tried to hide my acne marks with concealer until the blemishes ‘disappeared’. However, it resulted in flat facial features. Thus, I used to make those technical mistakes. Now as an adult, my ideas of beauty have changed. Diversity is one of the three main themes of the Better Lives unit and some lectures related to it gave me great enlightenments. One lecture by Shahidha Bari pointed out that inclusion is of great importance connected with diversity.Everyone is born different. We should not only learn how to be inclusive of others but also be inclusive of yourself, facing your own imperfection and feeling comfortable expressing yourself.

For the final project, due to my poor makeup skills，I decided to use non-traditional cosmetics, creating looks with the themes of fashion mistakes and imperfection. I did two experiments. In first experiment, I put on a full makeup, hiding all my blemished with concealer and using red threads outlining facial contour.Surprisingly, contrary to feel weird about emphasizing facial contour by traditional cosmetics, by using something else, it looks exaggerated but more interesting. In second experiment, I stuck some tiny colorful pearls found at home on the face along the lower eyeline. I exposed my blemishes with nude makeup so as to highlight my special eye makeup. This time I found that through photos of my second makeup, the pearls caught my eyes easily and I paid little attention to the ‘imperfection’ on the face. At last, combining the results of two experiments, I chose plastic ropes outlining my whole facial contour based on nude makeup, creating an outcome which I feel successful for and proud of.