I’ve written before on Dove’s Self-Esteem project and the creative videos they have produced inviting us to examine our notions of beauty. This movement isn’t without its critics. And, indeed, we need to think critically and carefully about a campaign related to beauty sponsored by a company (Unilever) that sells hygiene and beauty products. At the same time, even as we offer critical feedback, we need, I think, to take seriously the underlying concerns Unilever is unearthing and responses they are suggesting. Which brings me to this very well done – and for this reason also troubling and inspiring – TED Talk by Meaghan Ramsey,...

I thought this short video was a perfect counter point to, or maybe extension, of yesterday’s post – and comments! – about beauty. Chris Heuertz has spent his life working with the poorest of the poor and, most recently, working with children, women, and men who have been caught up in and abused by human trafficking. You can read more about him and his work at Word Made Flesh and on his blog – great title, btw – If I Blogged…. But he’s not just about advocacy or even help. He’s mostly about community, about living with and helping people fashion resilient communities that have weathered the difficult moments that any real...

Beauty, the say, is in the eye of the beholder. But while this is often used to capture our perplexity when someone else falls in love with someone or something we don’t similarly appreciate, it might also work in reverse. That is, we might have occasion to wonder why so many people have a hard time imagining they are beautiful. Last year I posted Dove’s expose on what it takes to make the women in ads appear so strikingly – and as it turns out, unrealistically – beautiful. This spring they have followed up with another ad about the challenges women have in seeing themselves as beautiful. The concept and outcome are both creative and...

“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?” That most famous of lines from children’s fairy tales has been brought back to the silver screen this year in two major films, one a comedy starring Julia Roberts, the other a dark fantasy with Charlize Theron. But I’m not writing about either of these films; rather, I’m interested in the subject that animates both movies, the fairy tale that inspired them, and increasingly our whole culture: beauty. It is for the sake of beauty that the Queen is willing not just to abandon Snow White to her fate but actually seek to murder her. And it’s a quest for beauty that is...