Skin as a temporary medium for contemporary self-expression – understanding painted skins on Instagram

Abstract

During the past decade, social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube have shaped how people interact, approach, and discuss non-permanent body art (Kennedy, 2016; Tarvin, 2018). This allows artists to momentarily transform the appearance using makeup, face and body paint. Studies on makeup primarily research cosmetic products and marketing while studies on face and body paint mainly focus on indigenous cultural identities rather than contemporary cultures. Despite the recent increased interest in non-permanent body art by mainstream media, there seems to be a lack of research centered on self-expression. Therefore, this thesis aims to broaden the knowledge in contemporary non-permanent body art from the perspective of self-expression by investigating how artists on Instagram express themselves.

This study examined 300 images that were collected from Instagram top posts from February to April 2021 using three hashtags: #makeup (n=100), #facepaint (n=100), and #bodypaint (n=100). The data was analyzed with methods from visual content analysis and using categories to calculate how frequently certain elements occurred in the images. This thesis focused on five categories: (1) relationship between the body art design, and the body as a medium, (2) level of skin texture enhancement, (3) stereotypical feminine feature enhancement, (4) context of the image, and (5) genre of body art.

The data indicates that: (1) non-permanent body art designs frequently rely on its mediums; (2) skin texture is not always enhanced to look flawless, and displaying some natural skin features is almost as frequent as smooth and unblemished skin; (3) makeup is frequently used to enhance stereotypical feminine features even if the image was centered around face or body paint; (4) nearly half of makeup centered images are pedestrian and non-creative while face and body paint designs were always artistic in nature; and (5) those artistic designs were frequently illustrative. Study showed that societal inequalities affect both self-representation and self-expression, but artistic expression and creativity play a larger role in non-permanent body art. Artists frequently express themselves by transforming themselves into an illustration. This study should be further researched from the perspective of the artists themselves.