Your alarm goes off. It’s picture day, the most dreaded day of the year.
Ever since class pictures were taken, students always seem to get worked up with how the shot will turn out.
Boy, girl, freshman, senior, it doesn’t matter. Everyone seems to care about how they look.
“I’m the least photogenic person I know,” Junior Sam Garrison reveals before taking her class photo. “And a lot of people think they are not photogenic, but I really am not, ” she insists before taking her class photo.
But unless you are a model, who actually believes they are photogenic?
“Portrait” photography is the simplest form of photography. It’s only of your face. It’s who you are. It’s how people recognize you. So if you don’t like your picture, does that mean you don’t like the way you look?
“The more I look at my school photo, the uglier I seem to look,” says senior Gabrielle Mercurio. Senior portraits are taken more seriously here at VHS since they are larger, and it is how your classmates will remember you 50 years from now when they flip through their yearbook, or when people are in your parents’ house looking at your picture hanging over the fireplace.
“I narrowed it down to three, and then I let my mom pick the best picture,” Senior Gabi Latimer admits. Gabi, like the rest of the seniors, took multiple shots and chose the best one to represent her in the yearbook.
“My mom knows when I look the best especially because I’m around her a lot so she knows what I look like” Gabi explains. If her mom is around her all the time, why is she not as worked up as when she takes a class photo? Do people try too hard to prove how they look for a photo?
Polls from dailymail.com show women and men lookk in the mirror about 71 times in one day.
“The figure equates to women stopping at least once every half an hour in a 16-hour waking day” according to dailymail.com. How obsessed are we with our looks? Have we gone too far?
Kerstin Gruys thinks so.
“I saw myself in the mirror and was being critical,” says Gruys, a 29-year-old who has a PhD in sociology. Recently she tackled the challenge of not looking at her reflection for an entire year. She brushes her hair and teeth without a peek in the mirror and even attempted to put makeup on simply by touch.
“I do it to boost my own self-esteem and inspire others to stop focusing on external imperfections,” Gruys says passionately. She documents her yearlong journey to live mirror-free in her blog, “Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall” to promote the message to embrace inner beauty.
“I’m getting my focus back to thinking about the real meaning of the day, which isn’t how I look,” Gruys admits. So far Gruys has found this to be a positive experience, and she wants others to be inspired.
“We have so much more to offer the world than just our looks,” Gruys says.
Maybe VHS should take a lesson from Kerstin Gruys to stop obsessing over their image so they can live a more positive lifestyle.