The "Portrait of a Beauty 2008" is a composite image, a cultural snapshot frozen between two eras. On one hand, it is the final, full-flower moment of the old millennium’s glamour—the last breath before the financial crash, before social media morphed from a pastime into a persona, before the term "influencer" replaced "it-girl."

The beauty of 2008 was the last of its kind: pre-filters but post-retouching; pre-selfie but post-supermodel. It was a beauty that believed in perfection as a purchase, a product you could apply from a bottle, a compact, or a curling iron. It didn’t yet know that in a few short years, the "portrait" would be taken by its subject, uploaded in seconds, and judged by a global jury of likes.

The year is 2008. If you were to paint a portrait of beauty in that specific moment, you wouldn’t use oils or watercolors. You would use a pixel. And you would backlight it.

This beauty is glossy. It is the age of the gloss. Magazine covers were laminated miracles of airbrushing. You couldn't see a pore, a freckle, or a flaw. The ideal skin tone was not "clean" or "glass-like"; it was spray-tanned —a uniform, tangerine-kissed bronze that signaled wealth, leisure, and a disdain for the sun's actual damage. It was the aesthetic of The Hills , of a bottle of Veuve Clicquot chilling on a white leather banquette, of the iPhone 3G’s new, shiny screen.

So who is the subject of this portrait? She is a hybrid creature. She has the long, straightened hair of a 2005-era Jessica Simpson, the smoky eye of a 2007 Victoria’s Secret model, and the vacant, aspirational stare of a MySpace profile picture shot with a digital camera on a low-resolution setting. She is holding a flip phone and a can of Red Bull. Her jeans are low-rise, her handbag is oversized, and her smile is not a "smize"—it’s just a smile, but one that knows it is being watched.