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Coral Reef High School senior Savannah Sarafoglu earned her Girl Scout Gold Award with a project that challenges the western standard of beauty – that of a skinny, tall, white woman.
“I’m on social media a lot,” she says. “There are a lot of filters used and Photoshop.”
She went to Palmetto Elementary School to talk to fifth grade girls.
“I did a presentation with two fifth grade classes,” she says. “The kids had some questions.
It was mainly me doing activities like writing about what beauty means to them.”
She showed that social media are fake and beauty can be found in everyone.
“And it’s not one standard you see on social media. Everyone is beautiful,” she says.
The project took about six months to put together. It included a book with photos to illustrate her examples. She started the project the summer before her junior year. One of the reasons that it took so long to complete is that she had the juggle the project with junior year requirements.
She knew for some time that she wanted to do her project on issues that involve women and beauty standards.
“I love to write,” she says. “I thought it would be great to combine those two interests of mine.”
She wanted the younger girls to know that photos seen on Instagram or Tik Tok are highly edited.
Sarafoglu put together a form that she emailed to people she knew and so did her mother.
“I asked if they would be willing to write what beauty means to them and include photos,” she says. “I did interviews with a few people.”
She compiled the information into a book and had ten copies published.
“I’m not selling them for money. I gave about half of them to Palmetto Elementary School,” she says.
She plans to contact the principals of a few other schools in Miami Dade so she can do more presentations.
Sarafoglu is the president of Girl Up, an organization promoting equality and leadership.
“I started a local chapter at my high school at the beginning of my sophomore year,” she says. “We do drives for Lotus House.”
She also volunteers at Lotus House. She’s been volunteering there since her sophomore year at the arts and crafts program. Although COVID did halt the activities for a while, she went back at the start of her junior year because there were strong COVID protocols in place to keep everyone safe.
“I help the kids with arts and crafts and any other activity that they do,” she says.
Sarafoglu is the communications manager for the National English Honor Society, a member of the National Honor Society and president of Spectrum (Gay-Straight Alliance).
She is in the International Baccalaureate program which means that she has to commit to doing community service and putting together a community service project. She went to Carver Middle School’s IB program and speaks English and French.
Sarafoglu plays cello in the Greater Miami Youth Symphony.
“I love playing the cello,” she says, although she’s not interested in pursuing music as career.
She is a National Merit Semifinalist which should ease her way to the college of her choice.
She’s visited a number of colleges and plans to apply to Columbia, Barnyard, Wellesley and Georgetown.
Her interests include English or Creative Writing as a major and minor in Women’s Studies.
Her career aspirations include writing and the law.
She’s attended Columbia’s pre-college program on The Crafting the Novel, a novel writing intensive. Two years ago, she attended The Young Writer’s Workshop at Bard College.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
