Welcome to Inside Beauty. We believe that beauty and fashion should be fun. Style is not just about clothes, hair, and makeup. It’s about showing the world what makes us unique, creative, and all-around fabulous! Like so many women, we were once caught up in bad relationships—with beauty. Instead of expressing ourselves, we were measuring ourselves against impossible ideals.

Magali Amadei has appeared on the covers and pages of virtually every fashion magazine in the world. But at the height of her career she was depressed, lonely, and bulimic. She took a break to take care of herself and became the first top model to tell her story on behalf of an eating disorders organization.

Claire Mysko is a writer and an expert on girls' and women's issues. Throughout her teens she starved herself and binged and purged while devouring the picture-perfect fantasies in the pages of magazines. She got help and went on to be the director of the American Anorexia Bulimia Association.

It took a lot of work to find our voices. Now we're speaking up and sharing our stories so that other girls and women can start sharing theirs.

Our Top 3 Beauty Tips

1: Beauty Doesn't Guarantee Happiness.
Everywhere you turn, the message is that physical beauty is the ultimate cure-all. It might seem like the perfect body or a flawless face would make life easier. Take it from us: that is one ugly lie. We both wasted countless hours obsessing about weight and making endless excuses to hide our secret behavior. In the end, we discovered that our disorders were masking much deeper problems--problems that had nothing to do with the numbers on a scale.

2: What You See Is Not What You Get
Stop comparing yourself to pictures in magazines. Seriously, stop it! You will never look as good as those models, because outside of the glossy universe, even the models don’t look that good. Thanks to the magic of retouching, the line between fantasy and reality is blurred just enough to make us all feel hopelessly insecure. Magali's B-cup bust was inflated to a D-cup for the cover of Cosmopolitan. Her waist has been trimmed, her teeth have been straightened, and her lips have been plumped-- all with a few clicks of a mouse. Perfection sells, and there are plenty of people buying. Here's the catch: there is no beauty product in existence that will work as well as Photoshop.

3: You Don't Have to Suffer in Silence.
We might seem like an unlikely pair, but our common experience has drawn us together. Millions of women and men share that experience. Eating disorders and body image issues have reached epidemic proportions, plastic surgery rates have skyrocketed, and it seems like just about everyone is feeling the “makeover” pressure. We have met so many amazing, intelligent, compassionate people whose lives have been touched by these issues. Teachers, students, doctors, therapists, editors, stylists, agents, TV producers, the list goes on. We know that anyone can be affected, regardless of race, class, age, or gender. Reaching out is the first important step. Find your voice, and find help for yourself or someone you care about. You can’t do it on your own, but the good news is that you don’t have to.

Inside Beauty is about going inside the beauty biz and getting real about what's behind the gloss and glamour. Get to know us. Get educated. Get angry. Get healthy. Get active. Get empowered to find the beauty inside yourself.

xoxo,
Magali and Claire