Home »
Authentic Beauty Project

Authentic Beauty Project

What makes a person beautiful?

Throughout history, attempts have been made to define beauty. Expectations of how one should appear to be considered beautiful have evolved from one period to the next and the standards society uses to define physical beauty are constantly changing.

During our Authentic Beauty Project, we asked the question, “What makes a person beautiful?”. Fourteen high-school-aged individuals participated in our project. We invited them to our studio for a quick photo session and gathered their answers.

The common theme of the responses was that beauty comes from within. That’s so contrary to much of the media that we all consume every day with messages about how we can be more beautiful if only we looked a certain way or who the people are that we should all emulate if we want to be beautiful ourselves.

Our goal for the Authentic Beauty Project was to create a unified voice that can be clearly heard over all the others clamoring and pressuring us to conform to society’s current beauty trends. We hope that those who participated and those who will read their responses will join in agreeing that real and true beauty comes from within.

We appreciate the donations of our participants that will be shared with Oasis, a local non-profit agency serving survivors of domestic and sexual violence.


Meet our participants below. We hope you'll join us in celebrating what makes a person beautiful.