What Makes You Feel Beautiful?

It’s a question that is colored by personal preferences, cultural understanding, and societal norms: What makes you feel beautiful? Photographer Esther Honig’s exploration of how beauty varies throughout 25 different countries challenged ideas about global beauty and showed how vastly different standards of beauty are throughout the world. However, we don’t need to look on a global scale to find varied and complex interpretations of beauty or what makes someone feel beautiful. Ebay’s fashion blog team set out to find what makes us feel beautiful by sending photographers to two cities in the United States. The team says:

Everyone has something that makes them feel beautiful. [We] wanted to capture different visions of beauty, and document participants’ own impressions of what makes them feel beautiful… Interestingly, we found that people identified things like family, exercise, the outdoors, and even white teeth as being essential to their feelings of being beautiful.

They found more than 80 people on the streets of NYC and Seattle willing to be photographed and interviewed, and asked them ‘What makes you feel beautiful?’

It’s fascinating that a majority of the people interviewed didn’t respond with anything that had to do with aesthetics. Rather, they cited things like their family, their passions, and human connection. The responses convey an empowering and hopeful message that perhaps our cultural understanding of beauty can shift to focus on inner beauty rather than the rigid and unattainable standard for outer beauty that we have come to accept.

Check out some of our favorites below, and find the whole slide show on Ebay’s fashion blog.

Images: Courtesy of Ebay Fashion Blog