When you flick through magazines and find heavily-edited bodies staring back at you, it can be difficult to accept your body’s differences as beautiful.
Hairless, scarless, mark-less - all beauty standards women are told they need to aspire to. Yet 21-year-old artist Cinta Tort Cartró wants to challenge this view.
The artist and feminist, from Barcelona, Spain, uses her work to protest “male-dominated culture” and educate her community.
More recently, she has been painting women’s perceived ‘flaws’ in rainbow colours to draw attention to their beauty.
“There are many types of bodies, just as there are many types of stretch marks,” the artist wrote in the caption for the photo above. “And in this, in diversity, there is wealth.”
She continued: “All bodies have stains, hairs, freckles, stretch marks, curves, lines, wounds, wrinkles... and all are equally valid.
“It is time for us to begin to love ours because, after all, this is our tool of communication with the world. And if we do not like the tool we use for it, we can hardly feel free.”
Cartró’s art is inspired by her own journey to love her body. She said she spent years hating her stretch marks and finding ways to cover them, but then something changed.
“I realised that if I did not accept them, I was not accepting myself,” she explained on Instagram.
“Stretch marks are part of our essence, our moments, our lives, our stories and us.
“They are so beautiful that I do not know how sometimes they get us to hate them.”
Cartró also uses paint and glitter to depict menstruation - in the form of colourful period stains on women’s underwear and down their legs.
She uses the hashtag #manchoynomedoyasco, translated as ‘I stain and I do not disgust’, as part of a larger movement among artists to tackle period taboos.
She’s also shared photos of women’s breasts covered in flowers, inspired by the #FreeTheNipple moment.