The past few weeks, my concept of beauty has been challenged a great deal – it hasn’t changed, though. In my world, beauty is not something that is painted on, it is not photoshopped and looking sexy has nothing to do with plateau shoes with deadly high heels.

Sitting outside a fancy bar n Ho Chi Minh City on a regular Friday night, a skinny girl from Elite Models Vietnam scouted me and obviously saw my potential as a plastic fantastic beauty. She asked me to join a photo shoot where they would make some photos to be in my portfolio. I went there the proceeding week and sat on a stone waiting for the agents to pick me up when this quite tall, very gay, Vietnamese guy pulled up. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, as it would ruin his hair and his face was covered in makeup. I was thinking to myself, whether that is beauty in his eyes, and it may very well be. He may think that he is too dark or that his skin isn’t nice or that a polished face is prettier than a natural looking one. What do I know?

We went into a big building and found their studio. It was a small room that resembled a hotel room, just without a bed, but with three large mirrors on wheels. We sat down and he took out his makeup-purse. At that point I realised that he was going to cover me in a thick layer of makeup, just like his own – or maybe two mm thicker than his own, plus rouge, eye shadow times 4 and an aqua-spray to make me look ‘natural’.. When he was done, I looked in the mirror – oh my…. !

My face had transformed and had become a stranger to the rest of my body. It looked like my face had been badly photoshopped onto a white girl’s pale body.. The colour was not near the same and my skin was like a mast, glued to my face. And just as I thought it couldn’t get any worse, we had another style coming up. This style included very big red lips – and how do you make the white girl’s lips bigger? Well, dah, you just draw around them with the lipstick – I am absolutely dying to find out how those pictures turned out!

What I learned yesterday was that this beauty ideal with a thick layered-makeup-mask is not only my dear agent’s, it is most likely spread out into all the small makeup-artist communities. I went for my first job as a model and was getting my makeup done. And to put it nicely, she was not cheap – especially with the eye makeup, which resulted in my eye constantly running to get rid of all the weird substances taking over its territory. We managed to fix it in the end, but MAN it wasn’t comfortable! She just didn’t want to leave my eye alone..

So maybe plastic fantastic is a beauty ideal in this part of the world, and maybe they could make anybody look like a model (of their standard) and I was just lucky to sit outside the bar that night. I will never know, but as long as being plastic fantastic once in a while can pay my bills or make my life easier, there is no point in questioning their beauty ideal. I will go with the flow and let them paint me any colour they want. 🙂