Customer Reviews

SuicideGirls: Beauty Redefined

5 star:		(83)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The first thing to strike you about this book is that it is size. It's huge and very heavy. The whole thing is just very tactile, with it's beautiful thick pages, filled with hundreds and hundreds of images of the Suicide Girls. Courtney Riot's design is subtle, but striking, and the photographed are presented in an artistic way that does not detract from their beauty.

What this book is lacking is the interesting snippits of journals and information that Suicide Girl's first book had. Aside from a brief introduction from Missy, and a description of all SG staff members, the book is lacking any text at all. If you are a subscriber to the SuicideGirls.com site you will realise what a shame this is, as the girls are as intelligent, and interesting as they are attractive.

My recommendation to you is that you are buying this book for a friend, be sure to include a gift subscription from the suicidegirls website, so they can get the full SG experience.

**BOOK IN GENERAL**
I was interested to see what the Suicide Girls mystique was all about so I purchased this book. For a little over an 11"x11" sized book at almost 400 pages and just over $20.00 this is a great value. The pictures come as full page, double pages, and when cropped, the pictures are still large enough to enjoy the detail. Cropping is usually done in a very non-intrusive way. You usually don't notice. The book is sectioned off (Chapters) geographically. The first five sections of ten are U.S. After that it's sectioned into other countries.

**CRITIQUE**
The book claims that it is beauty redefined. This claim falls far short of the mark. The photography is a sub-genre of glam/erotic photography. Its focus is girls with tattoos, colored hair, piercings, and unusual haircuts. The girls are most often in glam poses. If you said that it's slightly alternative playboy style photography, then it might not appeal in the same way. My hope was that it would show women in a different light, free of the conformity to established norms and mind numbing repetitiveness so often encountered with glam/erotic photography. I was disappointed.

The book only gives only a token offering of anything other than slender white women with medium to large breasts. There are very few Asian and Black women. There are a few women that in the modeling business would be considered plus size, but not large by society. Again, this is beauty repackaged to look alternative, claimed to be redefined, but in reality adheres to conformist societal guidelines of beauty. I wouldn't fault a picture book for displaying naked women, but its tag line is Beauty Redefined. I can't help but notice as I get further from my 20's that sub-cultures such as that represented by SG usually more stringently adhere to conformity and expulsion of individuality than that they seek to rebel against. When I was younger there was a certain charm to it. Now it just seems insulting to my intelligence. I enjoyed the tattooed/pierced girl photography, just the hollow attitude and social statement leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The book says that, "These images are our rejection of that Barbie Doll beauty ideal whose time has ended." Again, these aren't ugly women, they're Barbie Dolls with tattoos and colored hair. This doesn't in any way say to a woman that you can be beautiful if you don't fit the Barbie doll profile. It just says to a woman that if you're a Barbie Doll with the addition of tattoos, we think you're pretty. And the fact that the women are all naked with uninspired compositions with no socially relevant statement doesn't do anything to shatter the myth that women are much more than mute show pieces of meat that happen to have tattoos, piercings and colored hair. Again, I'm not faulting the images, just the hollow statement.

**PATICULARS**
Suicide Girls has been around since 2001. This book is dated as 2008. I can't help but notice far too many technical errors for a company whose main product is images. I don't think this books target demographic would notice the errors, but it's too frequent occurrence borders on amateurish. I won't fault a shot that's supposed to look like a snapshot, but when done because it is, that's sad. There are metering errors when shooting against backlit subjects. Exposures are hit and miss. It looks like too often they used a camera with a sensor/film too small to blow the shot to the size presented in the book or used a bad lenses. Often there are white balance issues, and not the artistic effect variety. The set compositions are uninspiring and lack creative thought.

**CONCLUSION**
I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did. Technical errors were too abundant. Creativity was lacking in most shots. There was not much new or inspiring. What the book does right is present glamour photography with women tattooed, pierced and with unusual hair colors and haircuts. The book dimensions and price are great. It falls short as art, but is a nice picture book.

Do You want a massive (6.5lbs) book that's full of amazing women? Since you're already on this page, I ask that assuming that you want to see women who are beautiful, sexy, and like nothing you will ever see in the pages of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. This book is 7 years worth of eye candy from a site that changed the face of web erotica remarkably and permanently, and did indeed redefine beauty in that genre. It's only a matter of time before "Suicidegirl" is a word in the dictionary.

Someone asked me when this book came out "How can they say 'Redefining Beauty' when all of the girls in the book are attractive?"

uhm... precisely.

The book is a collection of naked alternative women. By alternative I mean tattooed, pierced, colored and different (e.g. bald, half-bald, dreadlocks) hair.
It is very fun to see so many different women, which is what the book proposes in the first place.
You'll see a lot of breasts and not many genitalia. So it might be generally accepted as a coffee table book.

In a nutshell: fun erotica.

Bought the book as a gift for my boyfriend and we both loved it. It's the Suicide Girls so you're going to expect something good. Loved how the book was divided by regions with regards to the model's locale and the photos were great. If you already have books or videos from the Suicide Girls this in no way overlaps but compliments your collection. It's the type of book that you'll want to look at over and over.

the book is totally awesome, and the circumstances in which i got it are as well, but we wont got into that. the few reviews i read before i decided i would include my opinion are dead on with the facts as this is a great book to have. worth the price. the girls are awesome. all that.
i couldnt agree more, but what i want to let everybody thinking about buying this is to know is if you go but it off of the suicidegirls site, it comes autographed by missy suicide (found of suicide girls) and courtney riot (art designer for the book) for 40 bucks AND as of right now, you would get a free dvd with your order.

with that being said, BUY THIS BOOK IF YOU LOVE HOT CHICKS.

The SuicideGirls never cease to amaze me at their ability to capture beauty on film. In a world caught up in two-girls-one-cup, the decline of "simple" nude magazines and the pervasiveness of hardcore pornography, the SuicideGirls manage to reinvigorate sexy with a wide range of models even partially clothed. I highly recommend this book for your coffee table.

Pensive, thoughtful, inquisitive, playful, artistic, original, edgy, provacative, intellectual, breathtaking, and beautiful; this book redefines that age old question of "what is sexy?" It takes and presents a redefining experience in 396 pages of exquisitely shot and gorgeously laid out pics of girls who populate the concert halls, tattoo parlors, and coffee shops of our imaginations. It is the pictorial equivalent of a DJ successfully spinning jazz to heavy metal to emo to flamenco to classical, with spices of goth and alternative subtly mixed in, all while making it seem effortless and never alienating you.

The book, with little to no dialogue, relies on it's strength of the brightly shot pics of the girls, and allows these pics to tell their story. Within the pages there are pictures covering a variety of girls with different body types, attitudes, and interests in assorted poses, positions, and attire. Going from page to page you may find yourself staring at them like the girl who walks into a room that you can't take your eyes off of, or the girl who lives next door, or the girl buying that cool book that you long to talk to, and realize they do this without ever making you feel awkward.

Yet the real success of the book is by going across America, from the West coast to East, and then broadening out to Europe and the rest of the world, the book captures that this redefining beauty is not just regional or isolated to one country, but it is indeed worldwide.

The minds behind Suicide Girls continue to astound and stretch the idea of what beauty is. Everyone thinks they know beauty when they see a sunrise, until they hear their first Beatles album, then they listen to their first Hendrix, then they read their first Hunter S. Thompson novel...

So it goes with this book as it redefines beauty in art. The strength of these women jump off the page and mesmerize with quiet, yet graceful, insouciance.

In a word: resplendent.

I couldn't think of a more appropriate title for this book. As a child of the 80's, I grew up in the era where tattoos and piercings started becoming acceptable. There is still a certain stigma attached to people with body mods, and much more so for a woman, but I have to say I find nothing more beautiful than a tattooed woman. This book will shed a new light on this subculture and show that these women are as beautiful, and to me even more so, than any mainstream fashion or runway model out there. This is a must see for anyone who loves the beauty of body art and for those curious about something they may have never seen like this before.