Karoliina Partanen

Treat Yourself is about ritual; pursuit of beauty, gesture, decay, time, fear of invisibility, and preservation of memory. 

The project stems from my interest in the language used in advertising aimed at women. Advertisements convince us to believe that beauty treatments and products are fun. Like treats. That whenever we invest in these products and treatments, we invest in our personal wellbeing.

My own home is filled with different smiley, sunny, pastel-colored pots, creams, and scrubs. Whenever I buy something, I’m not buying the actual product, but the promise of happiness and lightness. In a tub. 

Adverts prey on people’s insecurities, carve out this sense of need, and then make money by trying to fill that gap, that emptiness. We are made to believe that we need them. That they are good for us. That with that healthy glow, happiness will follow. 

These lies are discreetly whispered to us by wittily worded labels on eye cream jars, by those glowing faces from inside light boxes at bus stops. Loud advertisements, false promises, bright lights, feelings of detachment and attachment, belonging and alienation.

What’s interesting is that to ‘treat’ something can also refer to a wound, a cut. I’m equally interested in the empty spaces as well as what is visible to the eye – in how that gap caused by a sense of disconnect and detachment is filled with foundations, creams and lotions. This project is an investigation of how and why those isolated, floating, fleeting pieces of self are sewn together, of the different ways the feeling of not belonging is hidden and suppressed, blended and faded out.