Brooklyn, New York-based photographer Cara Phillips has a history with the beauty industry as a former child model and makeup artist in luxury department stores. As she explains to PDN via e-mail, “Those experiences profoundly shaped my self-esteem and left me with a legacy of body and eating issues.” Phillips’s long-term project called “Singular Beauty” examines the world of cosmetic surgery from a unique point of view. “In 2006, I began photographing the interiors and tools of beauty providers which became ‘Singular Beauty.’ From the very beginning I was interested in how [photography] could allow me to confront my personal demons by re-framing my experiences into a larger cultural context–and then translating those ideas into a two-dimensional object that could communicate to others.”

Images from “Singular Beauty” are currently on display at Station Independent Projects in New York City through October 13, 2013. The book by the same name was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign and published by Fw: in Amsterdam in 2012.