The Beauty We Were Taught To Hide

Inside Naira Kosyan’s quiet revolution of seeing the body a new. Featured in our print edition. 

We grow up learning a simple rule:
Hide what doesn’t fit. Hide the lines that appear too early, the skin that stretches too far, the curve that refuses to shrink. Hide the marks life leaves on us — as if life itself were something to erase.

In her project “What You Don’t Like (But I Do),” artist and photographer Naira Kosyan challenges that rule with the gentlest of gestures: she asks women to show the things they’ve spent years covering.

The result is not an exhibition of flaws.
It is an exhibition of truth.

A different way of looking

Kosyan’s portraits are unretouched, intimate, almost disarming in their simplicity. They invite us to look at the body the way we look at a landscape: without judgment, without comparison, simply observing what time, weather, and experience have shaped.

Stretch marks appear like soft lightning across skin — not mistakes, but maps. Scars rest like punctuation marks in a story still being written. Hair, texture, asymmetry — all the details we rush to hide — stand quietly, finally allowed to breathe.

The women in these images are not performing confidence. They are not posing for applause. They are doing something far more difficult: telling the truth about themselves.

A chorus of honest voices

The project gathers stories from women of different ages, shapes, and histories — mothers, survivors, dancers, fighters, healers, dreamers. Their experiences vary, yet a single thread connects them: the long, exhausting work of trying to become “acceptable” in a world that defines beauty like a narrow doorway.

Some speak of illness that reshaped their bodies. Some speak of weight — lost, gained, lost again.Some speak of aging, of scars, of the quiet violence of comments from strangers. Others share the lessons of motherhood, surgery, disability, and recovery.

Each story is a reminder: our bodies have lived. And nothing that has lived is ever smooth.

Not perfect — human

Kosyan does not ask us to celebrate flaws or to romanticize struggle. Instead, she invites a shift in perspective. What if the things we dislike are not failures, but evidence?
Evidence that we survived.
That we grew. That we changed. That we are still here.

Think of a cracked ceramic bowl that becomes more precious because someone repaired it with gold. Think of a tree whose trunk carries marks of every winter, every storm — and still stands. Think of your own body with the same tenderness.

An invitation to see — and be seen

In the end, “What You Don’t Like (But I Do)” is not about the women on the walls.It is about the person standing in front of them.

The project gently asks: What have you been hiding? And what might happen if you stopped.

Maybe acceptance doesn’t come in one moment.
Maybe it arrives slowly — like light at the edge of a closed curtain — soft, patient, persistent.

Kosyan’s work leaves space for that. It does not preach. It does not demand.
It simply opens a door and allows each viewer to walk through at their own pace.

Because the truth is this: What makes us human is not perfection. It is the courage to be seen exactly as we are.