An artist is turning stretch marks into powerful works of art
A 21-year-old artist is painting stretch marks and making a powerful statement about the pressure women feel to cover them up and to encourage people to see the beauty in their bodies.
Cinta Tort Cartró -- who goes by the artist name Zinteta -- is from Torrelles de Llobregat, a small town near Barcelona. She uses different types of paint, including watercolours and tempera paint in various colours to create the paintings on women's bodies.
Entirely self-trained, Tort Cartró began creating art a year ago after she started thinking about why she felt pressured to do certain things in relation to her body, like covering up stretch marks. She began making a concerted effort to love her body more.
"This started a stage in my artistic career where I began to show every aesthetic pressure that against women and non-normative bodies," says Tort Cartró.
"Maybe that inspiration led me to transform stretch marks into art, to work with colour and have the ability to make people reflect on the beauty that they have," she explains.
Through these paintings she wants to "combat the aesthetic pressure" that all women face and to send a message that "all bodies are equally valid".
She says it's important for her that people are made aware that all bodies are different but that "each one of us has beauty".
"We must work together to break aesthetic norms so all people have the ability to love themselves and accept themselves as they are and that we can love ourselves," says Tort Cartró.
"Loving yourself is a revolutionary act," she continues.
Translation by Ambar del Moral.
Topics Activism
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
