- Okay.
I'm gonna give you guys a little taste of
100 years of beauty casting.
Okay Chan, give me your best 1920s claw.
Hey guys.
- Hi guys.
- We're back.
We've picked out a few questions,
so let's get to it.
- Yeah, let's do it.
- All right, this one's for you.
Muhummed Baddar asks,
"How will you do a controversial video like 100 YOB"
"Israel/Palestine without upsetting one side or the other?"
- I don't think there's any way we can approach
this subject without upsetting people,
because naturally, it literally is an upsetting situation,
and they have personal reasons,
political or cultural reasons for being upset about it,
and those are totally legit and real,
and we cannot treat this area without,
in a way, touching upon those real issues.
What we are interested in doing is taking a look at
this place that so many people have talked about in
so many different ways.
If we stick as close as possible to the historical story of
hair and makeup, that we can actually explore a dimension of
the politics there that we can't do in language.
- GoodnessGraces asks,
"This series absolutely gives me life."
"I was wondering if, in the next video"
"you could talk more about anthropology"
"and how that study ties into the project."
"Love it!"
- Love it.
Anthropologists like literally study
everything and anything.
They study primates in the jungles of Indonesia,
investment bankers on Wall Street, you know,
and what we do here at 100 Years of Beauty,
if we're thinking anthropologically,
is to think through visual material and visual culture,
so how images, everything from magazines and advertisements
and music videos to propaganda and the like
produce a kind of human visual culture,
and to just have anthropological questions about
a subject that people don't often study,
which is cosmetics and hair, so,
yes, you should all take an anthropology class
if you haven't already.
It'll blow your mind.
Okay, Cole French asks,
hey Cole, I think you almost took my class, by the way.
Okay.
"What's the general timeline for producing"
"a 100 YOB video from start to finish?"
"I imagine the whole process of casting a model"
"researching, filming, et cetera"
"takes at least a couple months"
"or is it different for each case?"
"The split screen videos like Puerto Rico and Ireland"
"for instance seem like they take much longer to make"
"because you're dealing with almost twice"
"the amount of work compared to your normal videos."
- Good observation.
It's true.
On average, I would say,
maybe like two to four weeks.
Definitely the most of the legwork is in finding
the correct researcher and then fact checking that research,
and then casting the model.
Once we get those two, it only takes about a week to find
all the props, find all the accessories,
and then get my awesome hair and makeup crew and our model
all in the studio on the same day,
and what you see as like a 60 second video is
sometimes like 12 to 14 hours straight in the studio,
and there's been a lot of long nights,
but I have an amazing team that I work with and everyone,
yeah, they kick ass.
It doesn't take two months,
but after we've shot the videos,
we hand it off to our editors,
and they pair it up to music and,
I don't know, how long would you say it takes to edit one?
Two days?
Three days minimum.
We try to get them out as quickly as possible
'cause we know you guys wanna see more.
Rocel Lahera says,
"I was just amazed because of the looks of"
"Asian/Filipino over the years"
"but when you mentioned something negative about Marcos"
"I stopped watching the video."
"My impression to this 'researcher' is"
"you're just good at doing research in Asian beauties"
"and doing makeup tutorials"
"but if you didn't even study history"
"well, you better shut up."
- Oh, shade.
That is shady.
Um, okay, so,
critique is fair, I accept that,
and I'm open to critique.
We're all open to critique here at Cut.
I think I actually responded to this in the comments,
but I've actually gotten like, a lot of interesting mail
from people in the Philippines about those comments I made
in the behind the scenes for the Philippines video.
- Which hit a million views.
- It's true, it's crazy.
Well, a lot of people are like,
"Why did you say that Ferdinand Marcos is
"a dictator and corrupt?"
"That was the best president we ever had."
"He like, improved the Philippines"
"and that was super awesome"
"and he accelerated our economy"
"and life was great and safe for us."
I actually, like, me, my mom and my mom's family
and my grandfather and my grandmother
are political refugees from that regime,
so my grandfather worked at a newspaper as
a political cartoonist and satirist,
and his colleagues were like, disappearing,
in the eighties during martial law.
Like, one of them wrote this kind of critical book,
and they threw him out of an airplane, so it's like,
they left in the middle of the night to come to the US.
- Wow.
- So, I'm like, I believe that those people writing me have,
that's a political reality for them that's real for them,
but it's also for me, like I can't not think about that.
Like, my whole life is structured around that,
so I can't see it like that.
I can't, I can't get onboard,
but no one can say that I didn't research it
because like that's really close to my,
I don't know, personal perspective or whatever.
- Yeah.
- To address the other part of this comment, I would say,
I hope the one lesson that 100 Years of Beauty teaches us is
that we literally cannot just study Asian beauties
or just study pop culture or just study hair and makeup
without being political subjects in the world.
So regardless of how you feel politically,
like, you should acknowledge that beautiful things
and candy and art and like, pop music,
actually are part of the political world we live in.
- Yeah, you've been saying that from the start.
- I've been saying that from the start, you guys.
- "I'm really interested in Chan's thoughts on the role of"
"globalization in shaping our views of what is beautiful."
"What are the benefits and drawbacks to"
"a more homogenized culture worldwide?"
"And how do we talk about the line between"
"celebrating cultures and appropriating them?"
- Okay.
All right, a small question there.
The most we've ever been globalized outside of
this current moment is the interwar period.
Like every look in the twenties and the thirties is
really, really similar, just like the 2010s might be.
So I think the world's always been kind of interconnected,
just how we think about it.
To speak about cultural appropriation,
can we just not?
I really don't want--
- Yeah, that's okay.
- There's no answer to that.
- Yeah, that's its own mailbag.
- That's its own mailbag, and don't be rude, you guys.
Don't appropriate.
- Okay, are there benefits and drawbacks to
a more homogenized culture worldwide?
- Yeah, of course there are benefits, right?
Like, you know, one thing we've explored in this series is
how, especially political projects like protests
can go viral and spread around the world.
Certain ideas that are dangerous, but politically productive
can go viral around the world,
so I think that is a benefit,
but of course the drawbacks are really obvious, right,
that, you know, people's cultural identities might get lost
or that, you know, we become more consumer,
corporate consumer subjects rather than,
you know, cultural individuals in the world.
So, it's a mixed bag.
That's reality, you know?
- Yeah.
- Directing 100 Years of Beauty is exhausting,
one, because of the manual labor
and lifting the tripod up and down.
Watching me do that must be like,
one, hilarious, and two, really sad,
because the camera weighs, what, like 30 pounds?
- Okay, well--
- Cool, I'm gonna just say it weighs 30 pounds,
and it costs a lot of money,
and I can't afford to drop it.
Sometimes I wake up the next day sore from
lifting the tripod up and down.
But no, it's really fun.
I love to look for inspiration on like,
Pinterest and online of women from those eras,
and I kind of get to like, model behind the camera
and no one has to see it but the model,
so yeah, that's fun,
but it's really awesome to be able to collaborate with
so many people, especially collaborating with our fans.
Like they reach out to us and then,
I end up like texting them back and forth
and like, showing them images, like, "Does this look right?"
and it's really like a team effort, not just within Cut.
Thank you everyone.
I hope we entertained you in some way
and you learned something new.
As always, leave comments down below for us
to answer in our next mailbag.
- And if you want to submit some ideas for research.
- Yes.
- Or if you want to be a model or if you know of a model,
then go below and look at the link.
- Cut.com/100yearsofbeauty.
Let us know.
We started a 100 Years of Beauty Instagram.
You can find this @100YOB.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
- I think that's it.
- I think that's it, for now I guess.
- Yeah, I think we've talked enough.
- Yeah, I'm tired.