Blog 2: Theme Reflection
The Better Lives themes have reinforced the importance in social responsibility for me. I cannot simply act through my words of agreement on topics such as inclusivity – I must incorporate the knowledge I have acquired and physically act on it. Social Responsibility works arm in arm with diversity in my opinion. It represents the responsibility of people to equally represent marginalised groups and minorities and to educate ourselves in order to avoid ignorance and communicate understanding and empathy. Through these themes, I have claimed my social responsibility to fully educate myself and use the tools I have been given to help put the positive focus on others correctly rather than solely doing self-serving projects.
The Better Lives lectures and themes have shown me how far we still have to go to have truly become diverse and socially responsible. I chose Fashion Journalism as my Better Lives subject and through this course, I have found that as a society, our journey of inclusion and responsibility has been portrayed superficially as fast-paced when in actuality these courses of action have not been exercised at deeper levels and therefore the genuine progress has been extremely limited.
As a Hair and Makeup student, I feel it is my responsibility to make everyone who I work on feel equally as beautiful or daring. I am going to use these themes to incorporate more inclusivity in my work. I find although I have always focused on inclusivity, I have become comfortable in my work, I feel I need to challenge myself in order to truly be the most socially responsible I can be. I aim to give feedback to my course leader to emphasise the need for more skin-based products that can be accurately matched on a variety of skin tones and skin types. At the moment it seems as though the focus is so small on colour variety and I and my peers, all typical struggling students, have found ourselves incredibly limited by the 4 foundation shades provided in our kits – although the kit has been meticulously planned and has a generous amount of other products, I do feel this is particularly limiting.
I aim to focus attention on makeup companies and apply the pressure for giveaways or more generous student pricing. One massive issue I find, as unpopular as this opinion may be and without taking away from the artists, is that Instagram makeup artists receive large giveaways of sometimes full foundation collections. A large percentage of these MUAs work solely on their own faces or do makeup on friends and do not work professionally on a variety of people. I find this popular giveaway rather aimless as the products given to the various MUAs could legitimately change a training makeup artist’s creative life and remove all limits. Although this doesn’t distract from my social responsibility, I feel this would be incredibly beneficial in aiding Hair and Makeup artists in being able to act on inclusivity further.