Which One Suits Best? Eyes is the first of three projects that challenge common beauty myths. In this project, Vicky Hodgson focuses on the obsession with applying eye makeup and shaping and manipulating eyebrows to suit the shape of the face. She covers her face with paper bag masks that have eyes cut in various geometric shapes. Above the eyes, she holds a variety of geometric shapes on sticks and asks, “Which One Suits Best?”

In The Skin Care Photo Gallery, Vicky Hodgson adopts a close-up head and shoulders mugshot pose and attaches props to her face to subvert the "claims" made by skin care product advertising. Her work, while a critique and scrutiny of consumerism and the beauty industry's influence on a youth-focused and anti-ageing culture, is also a source of entertainment. Her light-hearted and humorous approach encourages the viewer to take a closer look at this industry that dominates women's lives. Text accompanies these mugshot photographs to support the "claims" made in the images, adding a layer of amusement to the critique.

As a young bride, Vicky Hodgson adhered to the cultural 'norms' of heterosexual wedding attire, as expected. She wore the long-established Western ritual of a white dress and veil and carried a traditional bouquet of pale-coloured flowers. The most striking element of this ensemble was the wedding dress, a significant purchase made by her parents. It symbolized her conformity to consumeristic ideology and the discourse of powerlessness and repression associated with this ritual. The white dress, a symbol of purity and innocence, was a stark representation of the societal expectations placed upon her. In The Wedding Dress sequence, she appears dressed as a traditional bride, then ties her veil out of the way before slowly cutting the white wedding dress in two. Not stopping there, she removes and discards the dress, leaving herself dressed only in underclothes and the veil.

Which One Suits Best? Face is the second project in the series and challenges the beauty industry’s focus on applying concealer, blush, foundation, and contour makeup to different parts of the face based on the face’s shape. Vicky Hodgson uses masks layered with geometric shapes, with additional shapes held in place with sticks or placed at the sides of the geometric-shaped faces, all of which contribute to the question “Which One Suits Best?”

The inspiration for Beauty Contest is a 1950s black and white photograph from Vicky Hodgson’s family album taken by a professional photographer when she was two or three. This photograph is mounted on a card measuring 14 x 21 centimetres and was entered in the Sunday Dispatch Beautiful Child Contest by her mother. In this picture, she is sitting between a table and an embossed backdrop, dressed in a velvet dress adorned with a lace collar. In Beauty Contest, she refuses to sit dutifully and instead disrupts the notion of a beautiful child and the sexist stereotype of 'a nice little girl' by crying. She is comforted by a cake decorated with cream that smears her face when she eats it, thus ensuring that she is no longer a suitable subject for a beauty contest.

The starting point for this self-portrait is a large sepia-toned photograph, presented in an ornate frame that hung on the wall of my grandparents' living room when I was a child. Taken at the professional photographic studio of Foley and Scott in Wigan, this highly constructed image shows me dressed in my best-smocked frock and posed sitting on a table against a cloud background. A carefully placed teddy can be seen in the crook of my arm, adding to the look of a 'nice little girl'. But this teddy is not just a prop, it's a disruptor, a symbol of the power to challenge stereotypes and break free from societal norms.

Which One Suits Best? Hair is the last project and questions the beauty industry’s fixation on choosing the right hairstyle for a face’s shape. Vicky Hodgson wears a paper bag mask with a black outline of hair and uses white geometric shapes to challenge this obsession. By holding circles on sticks on one side of the hair and putting various other geometric shapes on the other side, she asks, “Which One Suits Best?”

Birthday Girl challenges the representation of Vicky Hodgson's girlhood femininity as seen in a photograph taken by her father in her garden when she was eight. This photograph shows her depicted as a 'nice' little girl as she is posing obediently in front of a bed of roses with her hands clasped in front of her body, wearing a party dress and a large bow in her hair. Birthday Girl presents a performance that rebels against this representation of femininity as Hodgson performs as an older woman with dyed blue hair and eyebrows. Wearing a rose embroidered dress against a background of rose patterned fabric, she enhances her recalcitrant performance by reluctantly wearing a bow in her hair and defiantly lights and smokes a cigarette.

In Now You See Me, Now you don’t, Vicky Hodgson's artificially aged face slowly emerges, disappears, and reappears. She chose this slow process to alleviate the shock of seeing such a deeply wrinkled face and to encourage the viewer to take time to look at the older female face. To achieve this old, wrinkled look Hodgson employed a professional make-up artist to age her face by ten to twenty years. This work emphasises the importance of older women being visible, appreciated, and accepted by society.