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Beauty Warriors

The series “Beauty Warriors” is a collection of photographs featuring strange and unusual-looking beauty products bought on Ebay. Through a traditional portrait style, photographer Evija Laivina raises important questions about the way we look at physical beauty.

Evija Laivina, born 1978, grew up in the quiet country side in Latvia. Her passion for photography would not appear before she was in her late twenties and got her first camera. She quickly found that she wanted to express her feelings through the camera and started to create absurd and humorous photographs. Evija grew up in a very poor family and her dream of studying art at the University could not be realized because of the lack of money. She had to start working when she was very young. It was not before she emigrated to Scotland in 2009 she could start realizing her dream of becoming an art photographer and she is now studying Contemporary Art and Contextualised Practice BA(Hons) third year.

Beauty Warriors is a collection of photographs featuring strange and unusual-looking beauty products. These products promise instant cures to almost all beauty problems; they fight “problem zones” and promise to cure problems without surgical intervention.

”I wanted to show how far regular women are willing to go in the name of this ‘standardized’ beauty.”

Evija Laivina

This strange obsession with appearance can be both very funny and incredibly sad at the same time. Almost all the products are very uncomfortable to wear. The black mask used for one of the portraits (scroll down) was even painful and left marks on the model’s face just after 10 minutes of wearing it.

 

Evjia thinks that the people that buy these products must, on some level, know they are all useless, but there is clearly still a large market for beauty gadgets.

– I guess that the dream and promise of an instant cure often overpowers common sense.

The project is still on-going and Evija is expanding and creating new photographs with the goal of publishing the complete series as a book.

 

To check out more of Evija Laivinas work click here. Underneath we present an extract from another series she has made: "Slime".

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