Beauty and the i-Beast?

Beauty and the i-Beast?

As if adolescence wasn’t already tough enough, young girls are increasingly turning to YouTube with the delicate questions: Am I beautiful? Am I ugly?

The truthtellers and trolls of the Internet are reliably candid in their assessments, heaping venom on the self-conscious teens. Louise Orwin, a London-based performance artist (pictured below), has used her own video to inform her latest work, “Pretty Ugly.” About the experience, she said: “What I found was that it wasn’t the ‘you should die’ comments that affected me, but ones like ‘Your eyes are too close together.’ It was really hard to take, so I can’t imagine if I had been 10 years younger and receiving those messages.” —Diane Richard, writer, August 4

**

Image: Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Source: Douglas Quenqua, “’Am I Pretty?’ Videos Posed to the Internet, Raise Questions,” The New York Times,August 1