The picture of beauty: Rae Ellen Bodie talks with Daniel Thompson.

 

Rae Ellen is interviewed by Dan Thompson of Daniel Thompson Beauty Inc., for Erica Ehm's Yummy Mummy Club blog.

"I coach a lot of female actors who really struggle (particularly in film and TV) to embrace what their specific, true beauty is. They starve themselves because an unthinking agent or casting director has suggested they "drop a few pounds"; they get their teeth done, spend thousands of dollars on plastic surgery, etc.  I've seen 60 year-old women at work on TV sets who hate what they see in the mirror; who resent the young women around them for their beauty, even as those same young women have internal lists of all the ways in which they themselves are wanting.  It's a vicious, heart-breaking cycle that I too find myself swept up in from time to time.  

It's taken me years to see the flaws in our North American perceptions of beauty; I feel the difference in my being when I am marching to my own drum; operating in the world from a place of possibility and fearlessness — and that my beauty has nothing to do with any kind of common perception of beauty or arbitrary aesthetic.
 
As a person who grew up on the prairies I saw my aunties elbow-deep in the dirt; taking care of babies; putting up their hair for church; banging in fence-posts, tending to the animals; driving tractor; butchering chickens; preserving vegetables and fruit that they had grown.  My first female role models weren't submissive women who dumbed themselves down; they didn't leave it to the men around them to take care of things that they themselves could take care of, yet knew when to ask for help.  They were fiercely independent, yet had the deep understanding that the business of running a farm required loving interdependence; that everything is connected."

Read more of the interview here.