14 DAY TRIAL // Beyonce is again opening the discussion on the impossible standards of beauty to which women must adhere and the pressure they’re constantly under to look “perfect.” She’s doing that the best way she knows how, through her art.
A few days ago, Beyonce released a brand new music video, for the single “Pretty Hurts.” It tackled the theme of beauty in the context of a beauty pageant, showing the kind of sacrifices women who took part in it had to make to fit the mold.
The video is directed by Melina Matsoukas who, Beyonce says, was the only director she deemed just perfect for it. From what she says in the behind the scenes video, she was perfect indeed because she understood the concept from the start.
“The concept of the video is really a behind the scenes look into society's take on beauty and how it doesn't bring you happiness and it doesn't move you forward in life. It's really finding yourself that brings you happiness,” the director explains.
Beyonce also speaks in the freshly released footage, explaining how she’s personally disheartened to see the kind of pressure women are under to attain perfection when perfection, fickle little thing that it is, doesn’t even exist.
So she came up with the idea for this video, in which she plays a beauty queen, which, in turn, offers the camera the chance to have a peek behind the curtain, into some of the things these young ladies do to keep up with the others.
Besides the unsurprising images of women doing their hair or makeup or fighting over a blow drier, the video also shows one particularly thin model eating cotton balls, which was actually a fad diet at one point and aims to “fill” you up without any calories. It also shows Beyonce purging in the bathroom after she’s told she’s not skinny enough.
“I'm pretending to get a face-lift and Botox. It represents all the things that women go through to keep up with the pressure that society puts on us. Some of the things that young women go through, it's just really heartbreaking for me,” Beyonce explains.
“It's really about inner beauty and substance. That song represents finding that one thing in the world that makes you really happy,” she adds. The message is clear: that one thing in the world with such potential can’t come but from inside each and every one of us.
Check it out.
