100 years of Indian Beauty
The team behind The Cut continues to wow us with their YouTube videos looking at 100 years of beauty in countries ranging from Mexico to Korea and Iran – all condensed into less than two minutes.
Their latest video is “100 Years of Beauty: India” which spans 1910 to the present day. Creative director Mike Gaston told Yahoo Beauty that one of the biggest challenges his team faced was narrowing down their choices for Indian beauty.
“One of my researchers, who is Indian, broke it down like this: India is such a huge, diverse country and there is no way to include it all,” he says. Rather than focusing on regional looks, their solution was to look at Indian beauty through the lens of Bollywood.
“The celebrity side of Indian beauty was the commonality,” says Gaston.
His researchers pulled images of Bollywood actresses from 1910 to the modern times, and looked at how the hairstyles and accessories such as bindis and jewelry changed. Throughout the decades, eyeliner also evolved from nearly non-existent to a cat-eye in the 60s to the ever-popular smoky eye using kohl in 2010. The researchers also looked into India’s key historical and political events to give the looks context.
Apart from the intensive research, the makeup and accessories also created their own challenges on the all-day shoot. “Normally henna lasts for days but we couldn’t start off the shoot like that,” says Gaston. The shoot began with a henna application using makeup rather than the traditional long-lasting ink.
All of Gaston’s 100 Years of Beauty videos have gone viral – the Indian one has nearly half a million views already – and he chalks up their popularity to a few reasons. “Whether you are Iranian or Indian, people like to see representations of themselves,” he says. “You have your own ideas of what you will see and there’s a certain satisfaction that comes with it.”
Gaston says his goal with the videos is to challenge how people perceive beauty and encourage them to consider the multiple factors which influence style. “We are trying to be contemplative about all the factors which shape people’s perception of beauty, from social, political, economic and religious ones,” he says. “Everyone can admire something that is beautiful, like a sunset, but style is more contextual and that’s what we’re trying to get people to think about it.”
Related:
Beauty Politics: 100 Years of Persian Beauty
