What is Beautiful?

I came across a stunning picture while I was flipping through W Magazine the other day and I fell in love with a few of the pictures. SO Priscilla Presley/Bridget Bardot kind of feel. One of my favourite pictures was of a girl named Candice Huffine, her hair tied in a scarf. Turns out, she's a plus sized model signed with Ford. Graced the cover of Vogue, appeared in various magazines and shows. Another model who graced the cover of Vogue Italia with Candice is Tara-Lynn.

Now, in the modelling industry once you're more than a size 4-6 US, you're considered plus sized. Countless designers have called themselves "plus sized" when they're as thin as a twig. In the show Big Sexy, there was evidence to this claim. It's amazing how the fashion industry has conditioned people's minds that beautiful means thin, boney limbs...prominent hip bones and rip cages and sternums...knees bigger than the rest of your leg and protruding elbows. You may say I'm being dramatic but the girls they push out on their high fashion runways are stick thin. Not even FIT. They would like to tell you that they're fit but there isn't an ounce of good muscle there (you don't need to be bulky, hard etc...but there has to be something beside skin and bones showing). This has been a problem for years! Young girls and even older women look at magazines and shows and strive to look like these girls. They binge eat, become anorexic, smoke, throw up all their food or their self esteem sinks so low that they have mental problems or develop a large complex.

It has been taboo for a long time to really accept plus sized models and promote them and publicize them. They claim they have stopped hiring models that are too skinny but 99.9% of the ones that are appearing in magazines and on shows are skin and bone. The public has voiced its concern with the kind of example and kind of influence these things have on girls and women.

Boy was a glad to see a plus sized model being publicized, not because I'm plus sized (because i'm not) but because it shows that being beautiful doesn't mean you have to strave yourself or look like those thin girls. Bear in mind there is a difference between being fat/obese and being plus sized. A girl can be big and beautiful...just not big, UNHEALTHY and beautiful.

The photos I found of her subsequently did not fail to blow me away either. I just wanted to share with you all, should you already know who she is or not, these beautiful shots of an equally beautiful big girl.

xoxo