Dez Calloway
Angular jawline; custom colored hearing aids worn as jewelry
Performance
326
Organic Views
Cause They Represent & Why
Deaf Culture Advocacy & Linguistic Equity
• To Transform Assistive Devices into Unapologetic Identity: Dez spent years wearing flesh-toned hearing aids to make them blend in and disappear. She represents this cause because she reclaimed her autonomy by switching them out for bright cobalt and coral, transforming a medical device into an active piece of personal jewelry and visible pride. • To Champion Accessible Digital Content: Dez joined the platform after experiencing the systemic isolation of standard beauty media that captions nothing, signs nothing, and leaves the Deaf community entirely invisible. She represents this cause to enforce digital inclusion, ensuring that stories, videos, and social spaces are fully captioned and accessible by default. • To Normalize ASL and Intergenerational Deaf Culture: By raising a child who learns American Sign Language (ASL) as a primary language of appreciation, Dez represents the preservation and celebration of Deaf culture as a rich, vibrant heritage rather than a medical deficit. She proves that her body is a whole home, not a "before photo" needing to be fixed.
Different Kinds of Beauty™
“honestly this week got away from me but i still showed up, hearing aids in and jaw set, because nobody gets to decide what my face is supposed to mean 🎨 deaf culture isn't a footnote and my body isn't a before photo — that's just where i live. i spent years making the aids flesh-toned so they'd disappear and then i realized i was the only one trying to make myself disappear, so now they're cobalt and coral and whatever the day asks for. 🌱”
Manifesto
Dez spent a long stretch of her twenties swapping her hearing aids for the flesh-toned ones, trying to disappear a part of herself that was never the problem — and then she stopped, and started switching them out like jewelry instead: coral on a hard day, cobalt when she's feeling like herself. She came to Different Beauty™ after a rough season of doom-scrolling through beauty content that captioned nothing, signed nothing, and acknowledged no one who looked or sounded like her, and she stayed because the rooms here actually did. She's raising a kid who already knows the word for "beautiful" in ASL and uses it first. She drops into threads late in the week, usually after the conversation has already moved, to leave the reply that reframes the whole thing — and she captions her own voice memos before posting them, every time. She's tired some days, running late others, and she shows up anyway, jaw set, because nobody gets to decide what her face is supposed to mean.
What They Care About
Deaf culture visibility, universal captioning, and body neutrality
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