This 21-year-old artist is celebrating the beauty of stretch marks by painting them

Cinta Tort Cartró, a 21-year-old artist in Barcelona, Spain, is doing her part to celebrate the parts of a woman that have long been stigmatized. In a photo series called #ManchoYNoMeDoyAsco, which translates to “I stain and I do not disgust myself,” Cartró, who goes by @Zinteta on Instagram, is reimagining period blood as paint and glitter, and stretch marks as painted rainbows.

“There are many types of bodies, just as there are many types of stretch marks,” she wrote on Instagram, in Spanish. “And in this, in diversity, there is wealth.”

“All bodies have stains, hairs, freckles, stretch marks, curves, lines, wounds, wrinkles... and all are equally valid,” she continued. “It is time for us to begin to love ours because, after all, this is our tool of communication with the world. And if we do not like the tool we use for it, we can hardly feel free.”

According to Cartró’s own Instagram, this project was inspired partially by her own feelings about her body.

“Ever since we’re little, they tell us to hate everything that we have on our bodies, and constantly try to eliminate what, to them, isn’t normal: blemishes, freckles, hairs and an endless number of other things, and... stretch marks,” she wrote on Instagram.

“I spent years hating [my stretch marks] and trying to find a way to get rid of them, until I realized that if I wasn’t accepting them I wasn’t accepting myself,” she wrote.

In an interview with Mic, Cartró wrote that the reason why she uses such vibrant colors and something as fabulous as glitter to highlight these totally normal yet stigmatized features is because she wants to show off what plenty of people don’t want to believe exists.

“I always use color to break with what they’ve forced us to believe isn’t beautiful or real, when all of this (menstruation, stretch marks, marks, etc.) is real!”