100 Years of Beauty in One Minute
Compressing 100 years of beauty into one minute isn’t easy, but one talented video team has done exactly that. The above video, which shows one woman sporting iconic looks from the 1910s to the present day, has racked up more than three million views in less than two weeks.
Getting people to notice was the goal, says Mike Gaston of Cut, the Seattle-based team behind this video as well as the now-famous Grandmas Smoking Weed video. “We didn’t want to be pigeonholed as the guys who make weed videos,” he says. “We were trying to be thoughtful about who we wanted to start a conversation with.”
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Beauty, he says, was the perfect subject. “We thought, ‘Hey, what if we make this time lapse? It’s fun to watch, but it’ll get people to have a conversation about how we perceive beauty over time,’” he recalls.
To decide on 10 decade-by-decade reference points, art director Jason Hakala researched hair and makeup over the past century. The hair and makeup team of Shyn Midili and Juel Bergholm weighed in, tweaking the looks so they could be done during the seven-hour shoot. One YouTube upload later, the video was well on its way to viral success. ( A social-media share from Zooey Deschanel certainly didn’t hurt.)
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Gaston acknowledges that the video showcases only 10 looks, and he’s quick to emphasize that this is the first video in a series. ”We’ll be introducing women and men of different ethnicities, body types, nationalities, and sexual orientations,” he says. Next up: a video exploring the beauty looks worn by African-American women over the past century.
For Gaston, sparking conversation is the main goal. “I have an interest in culture in general, but I’m really interested in topics that are maybe a little more political,” Gaston says. “With Grandmas Smoking Weed, it was this idea of civil liberties and what you’re able, as an adult, to choose to do or not do. With this, it was fundamental concepts of how we perceive ourselves.” We’ll be waiting to see how this series unfolds—and how the conversation continues.
Main image credit: Getty Images
