Beauty Redefined

Beauty Redefined is the academic and personal passion of Lexie Kite, PhD, and Lindsay Kite, PhD, 31-year-old identical twins with doctorates in the study of media and body image. We have a passion for helping girls and women recognize, reject and resist harmful messages about their bodies and what value “beauty” holds in our lives. Beauty Redefined represents our 501(c)3 not-for-profit work to promote positive body image and resilience through research-backed online education, sharing empowering posts through social media, and through speaking engagements in a variety of settings, from universities and high schools to professional conferences and church congregations for all ages. Our co-authored master’s thesis and complementary doctoral dissertations form the basis for our empowering visual presentation, which we have offered to tens of thousands of people across the U.S. since 2009. While many well-intentioned speakers and activists promote positive body image from the basis of helping women realize and embrace their beauty, we take a different approach. We assert that having positive body image isn’t believing you are beautiful. Instead, it is having a positive perception of your body overall. So many times we confuse “my body” with “how my body looks” and think of ourselves from an outside perspective, also known as self-objectification. Through both research and personal experiences, our online education, social media activism and speaking engagements illustrate the vital point that your body is far more important and powerful as an instrument for your use than it is as an ornament to admire. Self-esteem and confidence are crucial, but they are NOT dependent on what you look like — or what you think you look like. We emphasize that getting past the obsession with the outsides of our bodies is key to developing a positive perception of our own bodies, which is the definition of positive body image.