Esther Honig: What Does It Mean To Be Beautiful? at TEDxVancouver (Transcript)

Esther Honig

Here is the full transcript of journalist and photographer Esther Honig’s TEDx Talk: What Does It Mean To Be Beautiful? at TEDxVancouver conference. This event took place on November 14, 2015 at Vancouver, British Columbia.

Esther Honig – Journalist and photographer

I had a really boring desk job. I had bills to pay, so I stepped away from my career in journalism to take a position in online marketing,

It was six months of dull meaningless labor, but that’s where I was first introduced to this amazing website called Fiverr. And Fiverr is an international freelance website where you can contract people from all over the world to do things like animation, graphic design, video editing

And one day, while I was supposed to be working at this boring desk job, I was actually looking through the Fiverr website, and that’s when I came across this page full of photo editors. And these are people from all over the world, places like Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Greece. And they were saying things like “I can make your image perfect.” And that’s when I first had an idea.

My oldest sister always says that really good ideas are simple. And in that moment, I decided that what I wanted to do was take a picture of myself, where I was wearing no makeup and had no fancy lighting, and I was going to send it to these photo editors and ask that they make me beautiful. Because I had no idea how this sort of experiment would turn out, but I hypothesized that my request would be interpreted very differently, depending on the individual and the culture that they’d grown up in.