Shea Glover, 18, from Chicago, captured the reactions of friends, fellow students and faculty as they were told she found them beautiful.

The subjects, some of whom she knew, but most of whom she did not, had been told that Ms Glover would take a picture of them for a project.

But they did not know what the project was until they were stood in front of the camera.

Their reactions range from joy, surprise and gratuity to disbelief and even anger.

A few smile and laugh, with some trying and failing to keep a straight face in front of the camera, while others simply hide their face in their hands.

Notably one young woman reacts in half-mock-half-true anger, rejecting Ms Glover's notion that she is beautiful, and replying: 'I'll cut you in the face!' and telling her to 'shut up!'

Ms Glover stresses that her original idea was to simply capture everyday beauty as she found it around her at her school, not to conduct a 'social experiment'.

However, as she filmed the project, she found the ways her subjects reacted to being called beautiful interesting.

'I conducted an independent project, which evidently turned into a social experiment halfway through, regarding beauty at my performing arts high school in Chicago,' Ms Glover writes on her YouTube channel.

'I want to clarify that my intentions were not to get a reaction out of people. I was simply filming beauty and this is the result.'

(dailymail.co.uk)