Vancouverite Erin Treloar has battled an eating disorder and can relate to the daily struggles of trying to live up to the elusive beauty standard.
So she decided to create a place where women can let their raw beauty shine through.
Treloar says women are inundated with thousands of messages telling them they are not good enough.
“We size ourselves up against Photoshopped magazine covers, models and the perpetual stream of filtered, edited photos that pass by on our social media pages. We compare our behind-the-scenes to others’ highlight reels. The result: eating disorders, over-spending, anxiety, depression and above all a cap on our own potential happiness,” says her website RawBeautyTalks.com
Treloar says her own struggle led her to look for types of media that would make her feel better about herself.
“We are so often Photoshopped and filtered. There are not a lot of real images out there.”
Treloar’s vision was to get women to strip off all things that make them artificially beautiful and capture their ‘untouched’ beauty within.
She managed to find dozens of women for the project, including local TV host Fiona Forbes and US Olympic snowboarder Jamie Anderson.
Over 80 women from Vancouver, Los Angeles and Lake Tahoe volunteered to appear in front of the lens without any makeup or enhancements.
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Treloar says she ended up having profound conversations about beauty, confidence and self-love during the shooting process; and felt strongly she had to share these stories.
The response has been overwhelming so far.
The site went live on January 14, and on the first day alone, 15,000 people looked at it.
Treloar says she was surprised to see so many people take interest, because she did not advertise the launch.
“I thought about doing this for a couple of years,” says Treloar. “But I always thought that nobody will be willing to be photographed without makeup, Photoshop or filters. I’d been pleasantly surprised by the people who stepped forward — people, who you would think would be very protective of their image, have been so generous to just strip it all off, and say yeah this is me. I love myself the way I am.”
Treloar says they will be doing another shoot with 50 more women on January 31, but it is just the beginning.
Treloar wants to take her project to New York Fashion Week and the Coachella music festival and ultimately turn it into a global conversation.
Treloar says she is not against makeup and cosmetics, which she uses herself.
“It is a movement on helping women to find their inner beauty. In order to start that shift, we literally just stripped away anything materialistic or anything that can be covering our inner beauty off. So we can talk to one another without all that stuff on.”
She says they are encouraging anyone to take a picture of themselves without any makeup or photo editing, and put it online with hashtag #rawbeautytalks. All entries will appear on the site.
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