Posted by Amanda Marcotte July 16, 2007 in Asides, Images
136 Responses to “More on how photoshopping is subtly destroying our minds”
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What really rots is that all the hard-won personality in her face is just totally obliterated! Poof!
Are they going for younger people to buy the magazines? If so, why do they think that presenting these “nope, never aged” faces will do it?
The weird thing about all this is that it tends to affect my own view of myself, but doesn’t really affect my view of other women. I don’t tend to think there’s anything wrong with a little softness, a few crow’s feet, etc. on other women, but I can be irrationally hard on myself. It’s just bizarre how it works on that level, just so personal. I hope I look as good as the real Faith Hill in 10 years.
I never expected unrealistic beauty standards to be so… fake. The arms, though already definitely not fat, are made scarily thin. Her right hand disappears (which makes me wonder if the right picture was used to recreate the original, but the changes are radical enough to ignore that small quibble.) And what’s with the thinner face? Couldn’t change the typefaces, so they had to make her fit the cover’s teasers?
But I must say the dress looks better with flatter colors. Throw the photoshop gurus a bone now and then, I will.
It has the same effect on me. I see things in other women, and I’m like wow, that looks great and hot. In me…not so much.
a few crow’s feet, etc. on other women, but I can be irrationally hard on myself.
Maybe I’m just weird, but I wasn’t very happy with the “blankness” of my face until I started to get fine lines around my eyes. They give my face so much more definition and expression and depth now. They just look right to me.
Then again, I’m sporting some solid scars from a bike wreck one year ago this week, on top of other scars from classic tomboy behavior. These are part and parcel of my mystique for many who know me.
Smooth skin may be wasted on the young, but it tells me that an older woman needed to get out more.
Photoshopped one doesn’t have any sex appeal. The original photo shows a woman with a personality, someone worth doing the deed with.
Oh, yeah, Jon, photo re-touching is a good thing, and a necessary part of the printing process. Not so much to prettify people, but to make sure the color balance is as it should be. Cameras, computer screens, and printers all have different standards, and different types of paper take ink differently, so in order to make sure people don’t come out uniformly orange, it has to be done. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the culprit for the paparazzi photos where celebrities all resemble tangerines: magazines like US and In Touch have low budgets and poor standards, so they don’t have somebody go through and re-balance each photograph to get people looking normal; they let a camera’s natural tendency to pick up oranges have it’s way.
Also, you’re right, the “before” and “after” are two different shots. If you look closely, her hand is in her lap in the one that eventually made the cover. This may be why her head gets smaller — that’s not something that can be easily changed without it looking really stupid. As for fitting her in between all the marquis space, the photo is chosen and (mostly) finalized first, then the text is laid out to work with the photo.
The original picture looks so much more…I don’t know, human? She looks like someone I’d like to know more in the original. She’s beautiful anyway, the changes are totally unneccesary, broomstick arms are not hot. Personally, I like her eyes much better in the original. As noted above, character counts, and it appears she has it in abundance. Maybe because I’m older, I don’t think this “perfection” affects my perception of myself. I’m 49, soon to be 50 and I have lots of “character”.Ha.
Oh, yeah, also lots of sags and bags.
Woman/doll/woman/doll/woman/doll/… Bizarre. The doll’s elbow joint looks like it will crack in two any moment. Look what has been done to her hair on her right side near her temple. Her rib cage was shrunk too.
On the plus side, Photoshop may be increasing the longevity of older models, but probably reducing their fees at the same time.
I am looking at these photos like it’s one of those “What’s the Diff?â€? games. (You make it easy by flashing and overlapping them, thanks). In the untouched photo, she looks happy. For pete’s sake, they erased her happiness.
If you have not seen it, search you tube for the Dove Evolution ad – same thing.
Seconded. There are a lot of hoops women jump through these days that, IMO, are not only unhealthy but also unattractive. The Brazilian comes to mind.
I KNEW IT.
Showed Pop this picture. His response: “I like the untouched photo better. She doesn’t look like some alien from outer space in that one.”
What IS up with FAITH AND TIM? SHOW THE BACK COVER ALREADY!!
Interesting how the photoshopped picture fills in her skinny collar bone but gets rid of the slight bit of back “fat”
Um, watching her picture flash back and forth could induce insantiy. It’s scarily eeevil….
The thing is I think she looked better before the photoshopping, I mean I’m a thin boned person and so are others but Faith’s got a more…buxom body and it looks better natural. I see the use of photoshopping to clean out skin blemishes but it seems stupid to try to make Faith look like any other teeny bopper…she’s much better than that.
I like the original better than the photoshopped- it shows a real, beautiful, forty-something woman, with character and a life well-lived on her face.
I just wanted to note, though, how powerful that juxtaposition is and the messages women are sent all the time. I sat and watched the pictures flip back and forth for about two minutes. At first, all I could notice was that the colors were different and that her waist had been slimmed. Then I noticed her face had been slimmed, her eyes tightened, her laugh lines erased, etc. I realized that the longer I looked at the retouched photo the more dissatisfied I was the original, real woman in front of me. She appeared to become older before my eyes! And I realized that the original was, symbolically, me.
Goddamn patriarchal beauty standards fucking with my perceptions. I’m waiting for the anti-feminist winger to come and tell me that media images have no effect on a woman’s self-image…
It’s a real shame. She had a beautiful smile before she turned into an evil killer cyborg.
I agree, JimB, that what they’ve done to her hair on her right temple is quite unnatural. Very Barbie-doll. Also, her arms look awful. Damn unrealistic standards of beauty.
There are two different photographs being shown here. From photo to photo, the model’s hair will look a little different (especially if it’s long and worn down and “tousled looking”).
I’m not sure whether her rib cage was “shrunk” — I’m thinking either the chosen cover photo has her in a slightly different position, which affects the perspective and proportion of her torso, or whether clipping out that bit of back fat is the culprit. There’s almost no way they literally changed the basic proportions of her body.
Also, another thing to keep in mind is that these are very clearly two totally different shots. When someone sits for a shoot like this, the photographer takes reams of different shots. I do this kind of stuff in a slightly different context, and we’ll routinely get 200-odd ever-so-slightly different shots. The first step is to choose the shot in which the model looks best. This is a big part of why celebrities in posed shots always look a zillion times better than our own home snapshots; nobody is taking 200 different shots of you blowing out your birthday candles and picking the very best one to put in the photo album.
In the unedited photo, Faith is clearly slumping a little, and her back is straining against the dress weirdly (probably because it’s been ever-so-precariously pinned into place, which is another reason models look so awesome on the covers of magazines, they don’t have to wear the clothes as intended). So it’s pretty clear why they didn’t choose this particular shot. It’s not really disingenuous to choose the most flattering photo out of hundreds that were taken — do you really want magazines where the person on the cover has their eyes crossed, is making a stupid face, is standing in an unflattering pose, etc? I’m as committed to smashing stupid patriarchal beauty standards as the next radical feminist, but c’mon.
I’m not so certain. One of the things that makes it so obvious this was photoshopped is the patterns on the dress. If you look at it closely, you’ll notice that they hit the same part of her body in the same way too many times for it to be likely for this to be two different shots.
With regard to seeing her arm, rather than her hand - when the photoshop people made her left arm skinnier, they were left with blank space that needed to be filled - right where part of her right hand was. So they covered up the gap and hand with part of a copied and pasted arm.
You can tell this had to be what they did because they also copied and re-pasted that sort of triangle piece of her dress above the big fold as well, in order to make it all fit. That little orange bit that was next to her hand is now next to her arm - but it’s still exactly the same distance from the pink and green bits nearby. With all lots folds and varying colors, it’s just highly improbably we’d get the same folds/patterns if she’d moved enough for her hand to be out of view.
Plus, unless her real legs are as skinny as her fake ones, that’s a really awkward place for her right arm/hand to be.
I’m still trying to break from the photoshopped standards of beauty for myself as well. Whenever I see a flat belly on a magazine it drives me insane with envy. Even though I know my belly isn’t at all that big and the model on the mag has been photoshopped to the nines.
At some point do you think the pendulum will swing the other way and we’ll see an appreciation and celebration of natural beauty or will it just get worse from here?
Whether or not the photoshopped one is better looking or creepier is not really important… if every photo shop job did actually improve someone, would it make it any less creepy?
I’d like to talk to the people that made the decision to make such radical changes… find out what the hell is going on in their mind. How do they sleep at night?
Oh, I believe they took hundreds of photos - then used advance software to composite a single photo out of the best of the best of the best. They still made parts of her skinnier, removed all ‘blemishes’ from her skin and removed almost all the contrast from her face.
Result? An unrealistic, artificial, totally unobtainable look that woman are supposed to strive for. This helps drive the sales of diet books and cosmetics. Check out the ads in magazines like this and you’ll find a lot of cosmetic and ‘diet food’ ads.
-m
This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.
There’s a tool that let’s you squish stuff (I don’t remember what it’s called) and, again, you can tell this is what was done because the pattern on the dress is exactly the same - only squished. Not squished as in a “this is from a different perspective” squished, just squished.
For anyone that is interested in more info on this, YA author Scott Westerfeld had a great posts about it all when his Ugles books were coming out.
grrr - I can’t spell - or use correct grammar
that should be “….some great posts about this when his Uglies books…”
she looks amazing in the original photo. there is so much joy in her face, the lines around her eyes show so much warmth. i wish so much that we were able to see women looking that happy and authentic whenever we see a magazine cover, a billboard, or a television show.
im ignoring the photoshopped cover, as it lacks any real effect on my life at all, ive seen 1,000,000 women photoshopped into that same damn woman and its as meaningless as watching paint dry.
Mickle, all photographs that you see in print, anywhere and for any reason, have been Photoshopped, in that they have been color corrected, various non-beauty standard adjustments have been made, etc.
I’m a graphic artist for film & tv, so I’m often in the position of looking at 50 virtually identical photos and figuring out which one the director mentioned that he wanted (usually not indicated by anything obvious like the file name). And while I can’t pause the animation to be 100% sure, i’d bet money that we’re looking at two ever-so-slightly different photographs, probably which were taken within seconds of each other.
One thing that enables me to say that is that it’s really hard to cut and paste around folds in fabric. the folds in her skirt look completely different in each shot. Also, they clearly can’t construct an arm from scratch, and the bit of arm in the cover photo doesn’t exactly match the other arm in either shot. I guess it’s possible they cut and pasted a bit of arm from another photo entirely, but there’s no real reason to think they did. The arm doesn’t look that weird, and any weirdness can probably be attributed to the fact that they nipped in her waist, which might be affecting the position of the arm and shoulder.
then used advance software to composite a single photo out of the best of the best of the best.
Granted I don’t work in magazines, and they might have some spectacularly advanced stuff I’ve never seen, but this probably isn’t the case. Though it is possible that they pulled in chunks here and there from other photos.
@ Sirkowski — every photograph you’ve seen in print in the past 15 years has been digitally retouched.
@ Mickle — I know photoshop, and yes, of course you can scale things up and down, contract and expand, etc. But it’s hard to do with something like a torso. Especially when trimming will work just as well. I’m pretty sure that what was done to the torso is that the back was trimmed and the waist was nipped in a bit (and even that might just be differences in the pose). There are some pretty obvious positioning differences in the folds and print in her skirt, btw. It also looks like the position of the camera changed slightly, which is not something you can fake.
Just to clarify, I’m by no means trying to defend the fake magazine cover bullshit — I just know the tools of the trade. I hate the way all the personality was wiped away from her face, and while I don’t like her posture in the “before” photo, I think her body looks beautiful and other than cleaning up the flesh spilling over the back of her dress, I wouldn’t have changed that at all.
[…] Via Amanda Marcotte. Filed under: photo, beauty, photoshoppery, women’s magazines — Steven Perez @ 9:08 pm […]
From the Redbook website:
“Forget thin - When it comes to beauty, bigger is better.”
Look at her arm in the before and after.
Do you think Redbook really thinks bigger is better?
My feeling when I see these pre- and post- photos is: what’s the point? It wouldn’t have occurred to me that there was anything wrong with the initial photo. I can’t think of a good reason to be pushing all this unreality on people who probably wouldn’t notice it to begin with.
And as for having different standards for my own body and others’, it took me a long time to realize that I didn’t really have different standards - I would still think critical things about others’ bodies all the time. It just doesn’t feel the same way to criticize others as it does yourself.
Wow. I’ve never said this to anyone on pandagon before, but fuck you. No, seriously. Fuck you.
What a disgusting thing to say.
That images makes me unspeakably sad. How many young girls and women look at that and judge themselves as failing the beauty standard because they think that looking that way is actually normal?
so you’re saying that if i took a photo of you wherein you were slouching unattractively, and half your back was hanging out of your dress, that you’d want to put it on the cover of a magazine for everyone in the world to see?
really?
wow. yeah, i’d get fired in 2 seconds for turning in something like that. not to maintain the evil corporate beauty hegemony, but because the actress would sue the shit out of us.
now, of course, the evil corporate beauty hegemony exists. and it fucking sucks. it sucks that we completely edit all the humanity out of women’s faces in order for men to consider them fit to look at. it sucks that some jackass somewhere would care about the diameter of Faith Hill’s arm, and that the media is choosing to cater to that jackass, and in the process influencing millions of women whose arms don’t look like that (mine included) to feel inferior.
but still, famous people posing on the front cover of a magazine to shill their latest album or whatever, they want to look their best. in my ideal world none of this would exist — fashion/entertainment magazines are basically just glossy catalogues you have to pay for. and i can figure out which albums i’m interested in all on my own, thanks. but given that magazines exist, and some starlet is going to be on the cover, i see no reason to purposefully make her look weirder than she really is (which is what the skin-hanging-out-of-dress is doing), like just so we can all laugh at her or something.
Wow, look at how the dress pattern changes in the hip/thigh zone. They shrank the print to shrink Faith’s ass and thigh. That’s not as disturbing as the morphing of the toned arm into a bony stick arm, though.
Pai - they don’t think looking that way is actually normal. They know it’s abnormal but they try to obtain it anyway. If it’s not hurting themselves physically through bulemia, it’s hurting themselves emotionally through self-hate, or hurting others mentally/emotionally through bullying and harassment.
Faith Hill’s arms are over an inch less in diameter - toward her radius. Not just her upper arm - her forearm. What, ass, waist and legs aren’t enough, now we need anorexic forearms?
Charming.
I fucking hate women’s magazines. No faster way to be reminded I’m not pretty enough, slim enough, popular enough, rich enough or spoiled enough to be the woman I should be.
I’m going to bed. I’ve had enough bullshit media for today.
Yeah, I forgot, opoponax - a 115 lb. woman sitting with just the teensy-weensiest bit of extra skin exposed because the dress she’s in cuts her back at the wrong place is vile and disgusting! GET IT OFF THE SHELVES NOW!!!!!!!!!!! OMG!!!!! I’m PHYSICALLY ILL just LOOKING at that! Eeewww….. How dare she have… skin.
Heads up, asshat. This is Redbook, not Vogue. They cater to middle-aged married women. You know - the kind of women who have a little bit of extra skin, or, as you might see it, so much fat they don’t deserve to exist.
The corporate beauty hegemony sucks because people like you find excuses to find something wrong with naturally thin, beautiful women. You talk about how ridiculous it is to photoshop her face, and then go on to argue it’s totally legit to photoshop her bod.
As someone who has lost over 100 lbs and has to deal with the “little bit of extra skin” that naturally results from losing the equivalent of a 6th grader of body size, I heartily second my previous statement about the whole fuck you thing.
I think it’s a combination of multiple shots and Photoshopping. The hair in the final is nearly identical to the non-shopped version, but there are the changes in position and carriage that the opoponax pointed out.
Icky no matter what.
Ah yes, the photoshoppization of the world. And the beauty standard. This is how I can have a BMI of 19 and think ‘holy fuck I am FAT.’ Because size 6-8 just ain’t the required size 0-2 that’s required to even pass muster these days as ‘okay’. I’m not sure if it’s me being slowly fucked in the head by Madison Avenue and it’s photoshopping, or the equally effed standards of those around me, or a combination of both.
In another blog post sometime ago about this sort of photoshop-poofing, I remember someone mentioning that the women just looked creepy to them- ‘uncanny valley’. It was like they weren’t even human anymore, just plastic weird dolls. Creepily nonhuman, sort of like gremlins wearing human suits- close but just not quite.
And if I think about it for a minute, and turn off the part of my brain that’s sooo used to seeing this shit, I see it. She looks weird in the ’shopped version. She looks happy and healthy and pretty in the source photo. But as soon as I blink- poof! I’m so used to seeing this photoshop plastic beauty that it’s tattooed into my brain now. ‘This Is What Women Look Like Dammit- Plastic Skin, Ultra Skinny! So What’s Wrong With YOU Huh? Well Lucky For YOUR ugly fat zitted marked ass, We Have A Product To Sell You To Fix That. Except- Not Really! Ha Ha! But keep trying and buying and aspiring, you fat cow!’
Someone else in a blog post long ago mentioned that they’d turned off the damn tv and stopped buying magazines with this shit. They’d just tossed the whole hellish maw of glossy plasticky lies. And it felt like they’d freed their mind. I ought to try that.
It’s not even about not being “pretty” enough–not being able to attain an image of perfect beauty–it’s that the standards themselves don’t represent “real” beauty. They’re socially conditioned, manufactured ideas. If the overwhelming majority of women had spindly arms like the after shot, the new ideal would be fuller arms. It has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with what ethnicity has the most economic power, as well as whether there could be marketable products to fix the manufactured inadequacies.
Opoponax –> If she was ’slouching unattractively’ the photographer wouldn’tve taken her picture like that to begin with. You think she wasn’t carefully arranged before they took the shots?
He skin isn’t ‘looking wierd’… its what -normal flesh does- when you sit like that with that kind of top on. It’s NORMAL. She’d have to be skeletal to avoid having any puffs of flesh showing anywhere on her body when she bends.
So yeah, obviously this kind of photography is obviously screwing up people’s perception of what’s normal and what’s ‘wierd’ and ‘unattractive’. You’re illustrating that fact perfectly.
I don’t know–I’m trying to follow every fold in her skirt, and every little wisp of hair, and it looks like the same photo to me. In order to get the pattern of pink bit with two orange blobs and a green accent that’s near her hand in the ‘before’ over next to her arm in the ‘after’, she’d have had to literally grab her skirt and move it closer to her arm, then place the free hand behind her hip. Yet the folds over her left hip don’t change, and neither does her hair–I’m looking especially at the bit below/over her right shoulder, where a darker curl comes out to the side and a small blonde curl makes sort of a horizontal curve across it, with an even smaller secondary blonde curl below it, and then the chunk of hair sticking out with the darker and lighter bits in exactly the same place.
Can you point out to me where you’re seeing the folds in the skirt change? Because I just don’t see it. Some places were obviously morphed (lower left corner, next to the missing hand) but it doesn’t look like anything more than that, and the folds and pattern are in the right places for it to have been a squish job.
silly me, of course we should all always have our backs naturally arched - even when biology doesn’t work that way.
Seriously, how can you not tell that there is no way for her back to actually do that?
And yeah, I suppose technically you could do a composite of this picture and then one where she is more upright (and therefore has an arch to her back) but at that point it’s just soooooo much easier to “squish!” instead. Especially with all those damn effing patterns to match up.
And what the position change does is to give a curve to her back and a swell to her chest, like she’s literally pushing out her chest to make it look bigger. It looks like the totally bizarre position from that Mary Jane statue a while back. I’m not sure I could sit that way if I wanted to.
sorry if someone’s said this already… i’ve only read some of the comments
has anyone checked to see how much airbrushing/photoshopping was done of the tim mcgraw picture on the back cover? i mean, the answer is pretty obvious, but it’s still an interesting illustration of things
i see no reason to purposefully make her look weirder than she really is (which is what the skin-hanging-out-of-dress is doing), like just so we can all laugh at her or something.
HAHAHAHA! Look at that small area on her back where the skin is overflowing out of her dress!!! That’s funny!!!!
The dress is tight, that is why her skin is slightly overflowing in that area. So your saying that she looks “weird” before the photo has been touched up? Sounds like you take your work philosophy home with you….
Seconded. There are a lot of hoops women jump through these days that, IMO, are not only unhealthy but also unattractive. The Brazilian comes to mind.
WTF. A magazine photoshopping your photo is you jumping through a hoop now? That crazy Faith Hill, airbrushing her own back with her psychic powers. Unhealthy and unattractive!
I like how they actually made her earrings skinnier.
It’s the same photo. The hair’s the same.
Idoubt parts are brought in from other photos. That’s just asking for trouble.
This is a textbook case of a cover that’s been marked up by at least three different people–and the hapless retoucher is supposed to make all the changes, which has turned Faith into a camel.
as a professional photoshop illustrator, and a friend of many professionals who do high-profile work for men’s and ‘lifestyle’ magazines, I can tell you it’s not impossible or infrequent to mold everything from just one photo. My opinion is that this particular one is two photos, but that the second photo was only used for the right hand which is missing, and even that could have been created from scratch without the second photo, if the need arose. It’s only the fact that you try to minimise effort every time (because you don’t get paid that well) that makes me suspect the use of a second reference.
Other than that, the extra hair volume is easy to do and *is* routinely done. The ‘advanced software’ mentioned previously is just photoshop and nothing more, it is powerful enough to help you do those modifications if you’ve been through the steps before. It’s not simple and it does take a lot of understanding of light/shadow/volume to do, but once you’re there you can just pinch and punch and use the liquify tool, and even make a collage of body parts, make them as thin as you need, place them (thoughtfully) where you want and then piece them together as a whole without any seams showing. Using the clone tool or the heal tool or other techniques that allow you to sample an area of the photo and ‘paint’ with it wherever you want, effectively painting not with a single colour, but ‘with’ skin, or hairs, or pimples.
I hate it to no end, and even if my friends are not misogynist they still have to do this to get paid, and there’s too many photoshoppers who don’t even have feminist scruples. Even though I don’t do photo manipulations, I’m still guilty of accepting to draw teenage women in a very thin and stylised way. I object as much as I can, but if I don’t change them to the magazines’ standards, they just find someone else to do it to even further extremes. So I try to hang on to those jobs and at least strive for some character and volume in my illustrations of women.
Also, these misogynist practices make people forget that photoshop is an artistic tool and nice, no, *awe-inspiring* art can come out of it, relating instead the word “photoshopping” to nude, hairless, artificial-looking women. It’s depressing.
But it’s also true that these techniques have brought about the following attitude in professionals; “why bother with an exceptionally good photoshoot which can take hours of preparation, lots of artistic vision and commitment, when we can fix it later with greater control in photoshop?”.
And I second what Amanda said about such photoshoots setting impossible standards for myself and not other women. I also applaud every expose of before/after. Regularly unveiling the digital ‘beautification’ process regularly helps! I’ve seen many top model’s shots looking just as good (or worse, depending on the photographer and how much she wants to bother) as I do when I take a regular photo of myself with proper light. This tends to help.
Over the past decade, I’ve somehow developed a repetoire of photoshopping and photo editing skills (a la: 1, 2, 3.). In the example above, I also don’t think they’ve used two different photos. And if they have, the differences are very, very slight.
Removing ribcages? You bet, it’s a tool of the trade. Removing leg and arm bones? Comes with the territory. Shadows on face = BAD. Assymetry = UGLY. Stray hair = EVIL. And above all, pores, freckles, scars, and wrinkles are SINFUL AND WRETCHED.
You’d be amazed at the things a talented photoshop artist can do. I’ve got a whole database of photoshopping sites with similar images as the one above– and at this point, I’m so hyper-aware of the retouching that I can’t go to the supermarket or Barnes and Noble without laughing at the absurdity of what I see. Then, of course, I cry a little, because my husband and I are the only ones laughing.
What’s more sad is the fact that I’ll sit down with women– friends, family, acquaintances– and explain the extent of photoshopping and digital editing that occurs in magazines, advertisements, tv, movies, etc. I’ll show them the ways I can manipulate a photo, how I can “fix” noses, cheeks, waists, hair density, yellow teeth, and whatever other societal “flaws” might be present. Most are completely shocked: unaware of what can be done, what IS done, and angry that they’d come to accept the images being presented to them as a “representation of reality”.
Sadly, I’ve also had women say: “I want you to do that to all my photos!” or “I wish I could be photoshopped in real life.” But such is the virus of insecurity.
I wish I could start a whole magazine devoted to debunking the photoshopping myth. I’m beyond frustration, at this point, and I’m very tired of hearing men compare women to the painted photos on magazine covers, and women doing the same to themselves. It’s extremely depressing that this crap is so pervasive.
Seriously,, the posture in the untouched photo looks natural, relaxed, friendly. That’s what real people look like when they lean forward. Getting rid of the normal back curve was a huge part of what made the retouched photo look wrong to me. Scrolling back up I see– they removed part of her shoulder blade! Seriously, her body even in the second pic couldn’t have the right bone shape to allow that look to be real.
Ah, the future of human evolution, brought to you by Redbook, Maybelline, and Photoshop.
Young lads of the world, look to this image as the arbiter of your mating selection criteria. This nigh-unattainable filtered photograph contains the very image of what you should want to be placing your seed into. Settle for nothing less than this, but if you end up having to, remember to always treat her like you’re doing her a favor just looking at her.
Oh, and don’t feel left out, ladies — you can learn a thing or two from this as well! Want to catch yourself a gent? Just abide by these simple 8,635,192 dozen different guidelines, outlined by cosmetics experts, for how you ought to present yourself! Strive toward this “perfection” day and night, at the expense of all other pursuits, even knowing you will never attain this ideal we’ve convinced all the sheep-minded young lads they should be seeking! After all, even the reportedly most attractive people in the world still seek cosmetic surgery to make them even more beautiful. You might ask yourself, “what are they comparing themselves to?” but that’s just propaganda being beamed at your brain by Communists and Atheist Jews. Remember, ladies: You’re only as good as you look!
(This objective public service message brought to you by BeautyCorp Co., a conglomeration of Avon, Schlicht & Field publishing, Maybelline, the American Association of Cosmetic Surgeons, Playboy, The Clostridium Botulinum Farmers’ Union, Redbook, the Diet Pills Collective, and Weight Watchers. Steering Human Biology In a Profitable Direction.(TM))
The retouched picture looks so generic. That could be anyone on the cover of that magazine, I didn’t know it was Faith Hill until I read the link. Perhaps that isn’t too disturbing, except that it’s getting harder to tell women apart from these covers. Jessica Alba or Jessica Simpson, who knows? A lot of the retouching that gets done obliterates not only the individual characteristics of the subject, but often the her race or ethnicity as well.
I love Faith’s actual expression before the retouching, she looks like she’s about to leap out of the picture and tickle one of her kids or something. (Does Faith have kids? I don’t follow famous people.) She looks real, like someone you might go shopping with, swap cake recipes, invite over for a barbecue and get tipsy with. Someone who lives next door, a person with her own ideas and feelings. After retouching she’s just another anonymous generic celeb-bot, almost as if there’s a factory somewhere that turns out perfect, faceless people for mass consumption.
I also think she’s been completely de-sexualized by the retouch. I could watch the graphic flip back and forth forever, I’d still prefer the original Faith to the Faith-bot on the cover.
Y’know, I kinda wish magazines would start printing pictures of people “slouching unattractively” or else stop “cleaning up” places where people naturally bulge and/or “spill out of” their clothes. It’d do the general public a world of good to see human bodies that look, well, human as opposed to plastic Barbie-like mannequins.
Well hooray for Jezebel going right out of it’s way to make us all feel so much better about ourselves.
What strikes me is that she also appears to have had retouching done along the bridge of her nose. Apparently it’s important to have a size 0 nose-bridge as well these days. Even though the real nose is in no way “oversized.”
As a forty-something year old woman with two teenage daughters, I think I’m going to cry. Excuse me.
Everyone, I work in an advertising/ print shop, and I can tell you that these are NOT two different shots. This is par for the course in almost every image of a woman you see in print these days.I could tell you stories about the Victoria’s Secret models that would curl your hair. All of the alterations done to this image are easily done with photoshop, and they had a fairly competent person doing the work, as she’s less like a “space alien” than many I have seen go to print. Latley we’ve even been smoothing out wrinkles in jeans since the models are too thin to wear the products they are selling and the size-zero jeans sag in an “unattactive” way.I’ve seen 40 year old heads stuck on 16 year old bodies, with breasts from a third person thrown in- you name it. Apparently NOBODY is “attactive enough” anymore…
Because after all, whichever photo best demonstrates her fuckability is the photo that wins!
I don’t tend to think there’s anything wrong with a little softness, a few crow’s feet, etc. on other women, but I can be irrationally hard on myself.
I’m the exact same way. I’m about 20, 25 pounds overweight and I think I look like a damn whale. My best friend in my program is, according to her doctor, 40 pounds overweight and I think she looks gorgeous pretty much all the time. Which she does, so it’s possible that I don’t look like a whale to everyone else.
Apart from these magazines featuring prominently at grocery store checkouts, does anyone really read them?
(As you may infer, I live on my own planet
)
To echo what Amanda and Kyso K said.
I look at my friends, and I see some very attractive women, made all the moreso because of the “imperfections” (as the beauty industry would say).
They complain about their own appearances and I say “My god! you’re beautiful!!”
and then I go home and look in the mirror and I think “Holy shit, I’m old/fat/look at my NOSE!” and then find myself thinking, when my friends in turn tell me i’m beautiful, “Geeze. are they blind?”
…intellectually, I’m totally aware that this is in large part due to the fact that I’ve been reading fashion mags since i was a wee minor deity (hell, Vogue was a common thing for me to find in my xmas stocking and easter basket. Chocolate rabbit and supermodels. mixed messages much?) But it’s so hard to let it go!!! :sigh:
Opoponax, you are a collaborator. You enable the “evil corporate beauty hegemony” with your tortured logic. To justify large parts of this as standard photo-shopping, or as what the photographed actress wants misses the point.
This picture was altered in specific ways to make it appear a specific way, and the copy shape was not the issue, since the untouched pic obviously fits fine. This picture was meant to look unattainably thin, which promotes the idea that Faith Hill isn’t thin enough, nor are any other women. Faith Hill’s body was digitally contorted to satisfy male viewing pleasure. All changes made were geared towards making her body fit an imaginary standard, which you seem to buy into, that fools call “beauty.”
Even if Faith Hill was happy this was done, it remains just as wrong, and you’re supporting it when you claim you’d only make the small change of “cleaning up the flesh spilling over the back of her dress.” Learn a little consistency if you want to condemn the “evil corporate beauty hegemony.”
Two points:
The un-photoshopped version is actually more attractive & seems more like someone I would like to talk to. But, more importantly, who reads Redbook? Of course Redbook promotes anorexia and a shitload of other nefarious bullshit. Stop reading it. The only time you should notice Redbook is if you’re on the way to a copy of Mother Jones or Utne Reader or something like that.
This shit is definitely worth some serious feminist rage. As if on cue, I’m told by my mom that my sweet, freaking gorgeous 16 year old cousin has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Why? Because the lad decided she ‘wasn’t hot enough’ and ‘wanted a hot chick like in the magazines’. While she’s probably 10000% better off without this dumbass, my poor cousin is just crushed over this.
I wonder if even allegedly reasonable and non-stooopid men are likely to toss their perfectly healthy, gorgeous female SOs for ‘not looking like a magazine chick- and I Must Have That Magazine Chick To Prove My Manhood!’ Or at least be quietly upset and resentful of their non-plastic GFs and wives? There are a ton of smart women here who’s brains have been invaded by the photoshopped unreal ‘beauty’. I wonder if it’s going to end up distorting societal expectations the way porn has. Now you not only have to do it like a porn star- but look like a photoshopped cover! Yay.
Why can’t they let a beautiful, sexy woman just look naturally beautiful and sexy? I try not to be envious of other men but damnitall, Tim McGraw is a lucky b*stard!
A bit late to the party, but…
The saddest thing about normalizing such abnormal images of women’s bodies is that it makes women who are healthy and very attractive neurotic about their bodies. Not only is this (obviously) bad for women, but as a heterosexual man, IMHO, this is a huge turn off.
Sexy is an attitude, not an image.
I say this on every Photoshop thread, but. My boyfriend used to work as a retoucher at a fashion studio. This (points to before-and-after picture) was his job. He was very, very good at it. But it made him feel like crap. He became highly aware of exactly how fake and impossible are all the images sold as the “beauty standard,” and felt like he was contributing to it every day.
The silver lining of this cloud is that every time a magazine or catalogue comes into this house, he verbally deconstructs the photography, posing, lighting, and photoshopping to explain exactly why the model looks the way she does. And I’ve seen him work many times. I’ve seen with my own eyes how just a simple lighting setup can erase 10 or more years from someone’s apparent age, before any Photoshop even gets done — and how a bizarre, painfully twisted standing position can erase 20 pounds from someone’s apparent weight, again before any Photoshop gets done.
He doesn’t buy into those images and I’ve learned, from him, why I shouldn’t buy into them either. I’m still not immune, because they’re everywhere. But it’s a little easier to talk back when I know exactly why it’s not real.
Now he mostly does product shots, and doesn’t work in fashion at all anymore. He always liked that sort of thing in Photoshop better. One of his favorite accomplishments at the fashion studio had nothing to do with making the model thin — it was a model posed between two corrugated sheets of metal, and he was asked to Photoshop the shot so that it looked like she was in a tunnel of metal. The reflections were crazy, but he did it, and it looked good.
He occasionally shoots weddings of friends or family. When retouching those photos, he sticks to the mantra that he wants to make it look like a good picture of that person — not to materially change what they look like. So he’ll correct colors and fix exposures (this is probably 90% of his retouching time on these pics), take out weird shadows or giant zits, and he’ll pick the shot where no one is making a weird face, but he won’t make a bride 5 sizes smaller or her boobs 2 sizes bigger.
There are two sides to looking good - the first and better one is it is a symptom that you’re healthy, getting your required sleep and exercise, eating healthy and are not over-stressed, are well-groomed, etc. Being minorly obsessed in this way is probably no vice at all.
The other one is the destructive sort about which I probably don’t have to say much - many of the comments here address it.
Yeah, cuz Faith Hill is such a hound she needs to be retouched. Jeez
Scary stuff. Scarier stuff? I didn’t recognize the “real” Faith Hill, only the ’shopped one. I’m not a fan, so there’s some reason for this, but nonetheless, photo alterations are pervasive enough that that a real person has been erased in favor of the fake in my visual lexicon.
Could someone please explain me how it’s feminist to look at any woman: photoshopped or not, and declare loudly to other people that you’d hit that? I mean, we should be allowed to enjoy the aesthetic merits of women and we should challenge unrealistic beauty standards, but I don’t think that the best way to do it is for people to immediately flood the thread crowing about how they’d rather fuck the unphotoshopped woman.
On topic: I’m going to start telling people I’m a model and just say that the computer guys do all the work. I was featured in a Clairol commercial in last month’s Cosmo!
For that matter, the metal Bender figurine on my desk is an underwear model, and my cat modeled for Donna Karen earlier this quarter.
Natural women are beautiful. They are real and alive.
I learned long, long ago that no matter how beautiful or plain a person’s physical body may be, their personality will influence their presentation to the point of overtaking their physique completely. This was taught to me by the first truly mouthwateringly beautiful person I ever encountered in person, who turned out to be such a wretched human being that they were no longer even remotely attractive.
A “beautiful” person without a personality - including sense of humor and intelligence - may as well be pop wall art.
The discussion of the technical details is all very well and good - as someone who does (non-professional) photography and a lot of work in Photoshop, I’m as interested in the technical details as the next guy. That would potentially make a great thread.
So, folks, please don’t accuse the people who are being accurate about how Photoshop works or what happens at photoshoots into the enemy - in most cases in the thread so far, they are just responding to previous statements like “it can’t be done - look at the hair” or “why would someone take a picture in an unattractive pose.”
But, as other have pointed out, that really isn’t the point.
The point is that, whether it is one picture or a dozen, however it was done technically, they made her arms thin (and weak), they narrowed her chin, and erased any sign of her age. This is not making a flattering picture - this is making her into someone else.
I don’t have a problem with a certain class of Photoshopping - color balancing, or adjusting the background, etc. It seems to me that the point of a photo is to give you the sense of what you would have seen if you had “been there” (or at least been at the “there” that is being portrayed.) So, minimizing crow’s feet or undereye circles to counteract the extremely unforgiving studio lighting or to play up the sparkle in someone’s eye that the camera didn’t accurately catch, or even for a group shot, replacing the face of the one person who always manages to have their eyes closed in any given shot from one where they didn’t is all perfectly fine unless it is to be used in court.
I also don’t have a problem with it if the whole thing is stylized - if this had been a fantasy picture of Faith in a fairy princess dress waving a wand at a unicorn, for instance, fine, give her flawless skin.
But this is supposedly showing her in just a casual “real” moment - and with sad irony, the caption “what is and isn’t normal” about her.
“Could someone please explain me how it’s feminist to look at any woman: photoshopped or not, and declare loudly to other people that you’d hit that?”
…’cause it’s not anti-feminist to get turned on?
…’cause you’re assuming that said hot person is responsive to your advances? (hey, it’s a personal fantasy…)
I’m going to repeat it again:
in a post-patriarchal world, these magazines won’t exist.
i think it’s weird and a bit hypocritical to say OMIGOD PHOTOSHOP IS VERBOTEN!!!!!
but then to be ok with A) the whole notion of Faith Hill on a magazine as a corporate shill, and B) to still be ok with the zillions and zillions of other things that go into a photograph like this before a retoucher ever sees it. the major reason the back of the dress is doing that isn’t because “well that’s just what it’s like”, no matter how much one weighs, but because the dress has been artificially pinned into place to make it hug her curves more than that style of dress usually does, and she’s sitting in a really odd position so as to emphasize her bust and collarbone but de-emphasize her legs and ass. if photoshopping an image is an evil, evil misogynist practice, why is it ok to style, light, pose, and shoot her in a certain way, to make her look thinner or younger or sexier or whatever? why not just have her show up in a plain black t-shirt, hair in a ponytail, and just put her in a chair and shoot it like they do at the DMV? or better yet, why put anyone on the cover of a magazine at all?
also, to clarify, i don’t think Hill looks “bad” (or any particular “bad” quality or trait like fat, ugly, old, what-have-you) in the original photo. I think she looks fabulous. But from a technical standpoint, I can see that one teensy detail being a problem. Not because OMG SKIN IS EVILLLLLL, but because we generally like people to see us wearing clothing that fits properly (and yeah, anything that makes a slim person’s back muffin-top like that is ill-fitting). I think it’s taking things a bit far to say that all people on the covers of magazines should be photographed wearing clothes that don’t fit them properly.
Cymbal-
“I wonder if even allegedly reasonable and non-stooopid men are likely to toss their perfectly healthy, gorgeous female SOs for ‘not looking like a magazine chick- and I Must Have That Magazine Chick To Prove My Manhood!’ Or at least be quietly upset and resentful of their non-plastic GFs and wives? ”
Yesss! Yes, it is showing up in the men too- just look at the “I’d rather bone this cerfectly proportioned piece of silicone than a normal woman” Real Doll thing. If every image men are presented as “desireable female” is completley unattainable by EVEN THE MODELS THEMSELVES, of course men will feel dissatisfied by the women they see around them, no matter how they look. It’s anoher facet of the “never good enough” thing- even the MENZ can’t be good enough, or surely the’d have a Hawt Chick like the ones in the pictures! You must be some kind of loser- now make more money and buy this car!
I blame all my typos on the Patriarchy, by the way. Not my fault.
but is antifeminist to treat women like meat that exist solely for your pleasure?
I understand optimizing a person’s appearance, carefully selecting flattering fashion, positioning, adjusting for color, lighting, minute flaws like red eye and glare and what-have-you - after you see enough amateur photography, you get to appreciate basic skills that keep even the most symmetrical person from looking like a gargoyle thanks to something as small as an unfortunate angle or expression - but this is ridiculous. This isn’t adding to the natural human element, it’s replacing it with something else entirely. How unsettling.
They took away the moles on her arm. WTF. For some reason this bothers me the most.
I like what you wrote, cest.la.vie.
Here’s my complaint about female stars: I can’t tell ‘em apart. The band of beauty has narrowed so that they all look alike to me, which means we’re purchasing generally inferior music and movie products, because a female must have a particular face. Since the pool of potential talent is so much smaller, the likelihood of finding someone with Faith Hill’s face and Aretha Franklin’s voice is smaller. So, we settle for woman after woman with Faith Hill’s face and if one wants to hear a rich, textured voice, one must pass the music store and sit across from a woman singing on the street, for she’s likely to have a far superior voice than what is foisted upon us in the pretty, homogenous, thin-voiced packages.
Likewise, to a lesser extent, with males. Louis Armstrong, with his bulging eyes, and Jimmy Durante, with his bulging nose, would have a harder time acquiring fame today, although it’s possible, with famous, bulgy boys like Jack Black, John Candy, and Chris Farley. I suspect that Abe Lincoln would not be elected today ‘cause he’s not purty enough. Same with FDR, who couldn’t clear brush to pose for pictures.
Change of subject: Opoponax a collaborator? Did you eat Kooky Puffs for breakfast, june16_1904? What do you suggest be done? Shave opoponax’s head and parade her through the streets? Then people can point at her and feel superior, even though they sold croissants to the Nazis and washed and folded their underoos? Maybe you didn’t eat Kooky Puffs. Maybe you ate Drama Chex.
Collaborator. Bah. You went nuclear with your first salvo.
Yeah, Photoshop has destroyed part of our collective mind. And, hey, I’m part of the problem, not the solution. Just the other day, I was putting the cover on a book by a not-so-cute political theorist and I thought, hmmmm, he would look better with a thinner face and a bit more hair. So I put a bit more coal in the Photoshop hopper and viola! the theorist is cuter. I’d say I make those kinds of changes–without thinking much about it–to about 75% of the books that come my way. And, hey, a lot of those books are essentialy lefty reading. I’m sure it’s contributing to our insanity. Ewww, Chomsky doesn’t look so good in person but he looks okay on his book. Anyway, Photoshop shit happens, even to progressives. In fact, once in a while, it’s nice to Photoshop someone you don’t like, maybe subtract a little hair, maybe widen their face a bit, add a mole, or whatever just too keep everyone on their toes.
For those interested, there is a later thread on Jezebel that explains all the ’shopping done. Voila.
I think people need to lay off the artists who have found their way to this skill set and are making their livings doing what they are paid to do. There are two sides to the proposition - side A being the corporate monolith and side B being the consumer. Both sides are demanding these manipulations. The artists are merely being paid to provide. Screeching at the guy on the cigarette assembly line does diddly to move the argument that smoking is bad and should stopped forward. And hey, maybe the guy on the assembly line knows something that might be useful!
I agree with Holly wholeheartedly - it’s a damn shame we have gotten so consumed with surfaces that that is the first prerequisite for success. I mean, look at empty boobs like Paris Hilton- wtf? And I mean really and come on… wtf?? She’s a perfect endpoint of this obsession - totally surface with no substance whatsoever. Or the soft porn that passes for music videos now. So depressing. So here’s an action item- stop consuming that stuff. Don’t watch the stupid banal tv shows, or better yet, call the advertisers and tell them to stop supporting the twaddle. Don’t buy the magazines, and write a letter to the editor explaining why and what you’d like to see instead. The people selling that stuff only do it for one reason: to make money. They aren’t trying to brainwash you, they want your money. So stop giving it to them, and TELL THEM WHY and what you WOULD buy.
GirlPower has a site up that demonstrates how photos are manipulated to perfect the ideal girlwoman– I sent the link to my daughter so that she’d never look uncritically at a magazine cover ever, ever again:
http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/retouch/
Y’know, I wonder if there would be any point in filing against the company for false advertising….
Would that reinforce the objectification or merely highlight it?
I feel like I don’t have much right to comment on this since I’m in a business (performing arts, onstage) that is part of the beauty culture. Thinking of my *professional* persona (in no way equivalent to who I am as a person in my daily life) and evaluating that persona on its pleasing appearance or lack thereof is natural to me, because it is part of how I attract business. The thing is, I don’t confuse that with reality, but it’s soooooo common to see people that do.
Nonetheless I’ll reiterate my shock at just how far it’s gone now, and what is considered potentially offensive. If you look at photos of fashion models from the 50’s and 60’s you can still see evidence of their humanity (a little flesh where the belt was fastened too tightly, unretouched thighs in bathing suit shots - and these were thin women by any standard).
I was really surprised when I got my first set new headshots after moving to NY and took them to the reproduction studio for editing…I was perfectly happy to see the dark undereye circles and couple spots of uneven skin texture go (I had a bout of acne in high school/college) but I was surprised when they pointed to some of the small, flat dark moles on my neck and decolletage and said “you’ll want these to go too, we’ll take them out.” I was actually naive enough to say I rather liked them and didn’t know they were considered a flaw, and the retoucher looked at me like I had three heads. “Well personally no, I think they look fine,” he said, “but it’s really industry standard, I’ve never had a client *not* want me to do this. You’ll have to trust me, we do this on all our retouch jobs.”
Well, fine, Alyssa, if you’re going to agree with me wholeheartedly, then I’m going to agree with you wholeheartedly right back and especially this: “There are two sides to the proposition - side A being the corporate monolith and side B being the consumer. Both sides are demanding these manipulations.”
It isn’t just the corporations that shape us. We shape them. Plus, many of us are elements of those corporations, so we can reshape them internally.
Paris Hilton is a perfect example of our just desserts for our unfettered appetites for superficial perfection. She’s purty and that’s all she’s got and that’s all we’ve got. She poses and she’s purty and we stare and stare.
So, yep, as Alyssa said, turn off the tv and don’t buy the mags. I’ve never seen American Idol and people mention many shows that I don’t know. I’ve also never purchased a Cosmo or any of its ilk, so I have no clue what the 20 SEX TRICKS EVERY GUY WANTS!!! are. And yes, tell the mag/tv/movie folks what you want or patronize those who deliver what you want. They’ll follow the money like a hound follows a scent: nose to the ground, nostrils flared, and tireless.
“It’s the same photo. The hair’s the same.”
I have five different pictures of Charlize Theron posing for the Aeon Flux poster on my computer. The hair in the final poster is composited out of the best bits of the other ones.
Check out the women’s ankles and arms in these cut paper compositions, which date from the nineteen-teens and were made in Germany: http://cgi.liveauctions.ebay.com/10387-Group-of-Hans-Brasch-Scherenschnitte-or-Cut-Pape_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQcategoryZ28221QQihZ009QQitemZ190131564195QQrdZ1
It reminds me that corporate America didn’t invent the daddy-long-leggy, ideal female.
Do tell. (Cause whenever I’ve flipped through a VS catalog, I’ve wondered if anyone’s boobs — even the size 0-2 models’ — could ever possibly look like that in a bra.)
Pai, you’re an asshole. Opponax is making perfectly valid points, and WORKS in the field. S/he is not defending the practice, just pointing out the technical issues.
Work in the industry, dickhead, and see how long you’d last.
Another action item for you parents out there, and one I have done quite enthusiastically for the 17 and 20 years of my daughters’ lives: Talk about this stuff with them! Show them the before/afters - for girls, explain why they should not think about this as some kind of goal - for boys, explain how they are being manipulated to expect that from real people and for both; the consequences of being led about by the nose by the corporate monolith. Sit and watch what they watch, listen to what they listen to, and talk about it! They’re sponges - you’re not; and running interference will do them and you - and the world - a world of good. (this also works to alert them to manipulation in all its forms. Start peeling that onion with them!)
If you don’t have kids of your own, go borrow some! Kidding aside, though, there has never been a more pervasive media environment than this one, and unless we somehow wrest control of it or at least its effects on us and on our children, we will continue to serve the borg.
So much for loving your life.
There’s a great article in Kiss My Tiara about magazine covers and how even the most beautiful women get Photoshopped.
Some great lines in there: “My brother came in today. He said:”Guess what I’m doing. I’m making Cindy Crawford’s tits bigger.” Hello? Cindy Crawford isn’t beautiful enough, but has to have some acne-spotted kid with a 2-gig hard drive manipulate her picture?”
This is just so scary. Each generation has a warmed sense of reality due to whatever image types dominate the media. For example, most of the guys I know can’t tell the difference between real and fake boobs because they have no idea what real boobs look like. They simply haven’t seen enough to know. And many women are way too hard on themselves trying to conform to these fantasies.
haha! “Warmed” is a typo. Should say “warped.”
Thank you mighty ponygirl-I was annoyed by those comments too. Who cares who you’d rather have sex with, that’s not the point! I always find it alarming to hear that kind of stuff on a feminist website.
“but is antifeminist to treat women like meat that exist solely for your pleasure?”
Indeed. Though I didn’t feel that anyone here did that. (Nor do I hang out with anyone who gives off that vibe.)
“turn off the tv and don’t buy the mags”
Don’t have TV! Don’t bother with mags. I have radio and internet and DVDs. Controlled media, ‘cept the radio, but it’s not as heinous as TV; it can’t be, because it can’t bedazzle with pretty visual vapidness.) Oh, and the paper in the breakroom.
“whenever I’ve flipped through a VS catalog, I’ve wondered if anyone’s boobs — even the size 0-2 models’ — could ever possibly look like that in a bra.”
Amen.
What bothers me most about images like this is not just their role in creating an impossible beauty standard but especially their role in othering women, dehumanizing them, and recasting them as existing solely for and through the male gaze.
It strikes me that the essential underlying purpose of the cultural saturation of these images is to take real living human women and re-cast them as real dolls. To dehumanize them, de-individualize them, and recreate them as entirely iterations of what the socially constructed male gaze wishes to see.
::nods to Praxis:: And also in the process making the range of ‘acceptable’ beauty smaller and smaller (this was also noted earlier in the thread). From a production point of view, it’s far easier to sell a small set of products that you control than to try to follow the whims of the individual. I can barely tell the models apart anymore, all reduced to Disney Princess plasticity. Sighhhh. Go find a natural, real beauty today and tell her she is one! (or he - don’t mean to leave you out guys but… you know.)
raging red, the short answer is no.
Not least because if you’ve noticed, all the lacy/see-through ones don’t show any nipple where there ought to be. It’s kind of terrifying when you notice that. I know it’s a thing about avoiding obscenity laws, rather than plastifying women (even though the two are not entirely unrelated), but it just adds to the unreality of it. It’s like someone not having eyebrows.
alyssa wrote: “I can barely tell the models apart anymore, all reduced to Disney Princess plasticity.”
Yep. I once saw this magazine called W, in which many of the models were androgynous, big-nosed, flat-chested, and stunning partly because they weren’t the parody of femininity, big-breasted, flat-faced, and numbing models I typically see. A friend showed the mag to me because she was delighted to see something other than the clones between the covers.
Holly Capote: that’s the thing about Paris. She’s not even pretty. Yeah, she’s aerobicized and bleached and groomed and bedecked within an inch of her life, but her face is hideous, and not just because her inner troll is shining through. They’re not even in love with her beauty, it’s just the million-dollar packaging.
Just to save you some time, the 20 SEX TRICKS EVERY GUY WANTS!!! are: blowjobs. Altoids blowjobs, ice cube blowjobs, etc. At least that’s what it was a few years ago. Now I think sexual-service fashions are trending more to anal, if not pedophilia/snuff. I think they’re going to have to draw the line at anal, given that those last two are going to be a hard sell even for Cosmo.
“Whenever I’ve flipped through a VS catalog, I’ve wondered if anyone’s boobs — even the size 0-2 models’ — could ever possibly look like that in a bra.”
On average, increased by 20% and hiked farther up the chest, or ’shopped in from another model entirely. And yes, all traces of nipple removed to protect the children! Oh, and often they aren’t even wearing the underwear that they are “wearing”.
But it’s not really the boobs that bother me, it’s the other things that are done- like slimming down the knees/elbows so they are not the widest point of a too-thin limb, hiding the spine knobbies. Hiding the beautiful eye-wrinklies that many of the women and men have-
It’s not the fault of the artists. Most of them are just paying the rent how they can.
Slimming down joints … hiding bits of spine …
I guess I’m not taking lunch today.
Flora, I actually ilke Paris’s face because she doesn’t look like a complete clone. What I don’t like about Paris is that she gets her own tv show instead of Amanda, who has something to say and is funny too.
Shorter: Sure, Paris is purty, but that purtiness doesn’t warrant our attention.
Yeah, it’s the slimming down of joints that gives me complexes — after a life of looking at retouched images, I invariably feel like my own elbows, knees, knuckles, etc. are too knobbly looking.
I also hate the removal of that little pooch of skin/fat between the upper breast and armpit, because let’s face it, all humans have that, and in fact require it to be able to fully extend our arms. And I hate the way that the digital removal of it makes me paranoid about how I look in a tank top, when it’s something I’m actually supposed to have.
Opoponax I have that same complex from seeing way to many anorexic/too low body fat people in magazines and in the plasticized city I live in.
[…] (Via Pandagon) […]
And what did they do with that woman’s arm?!
The mind-blowing thing is that this is being done to people that any sane person would already consider very attractive. If this is being done to the beautiful people, I’m sure the thought-process must go, what chance in hell do us regular folks have?
I also think the picture where Faith looks older, wrinkly and flat-haired is much more attractive. I think it may be because of her powerful forearms.
I don’t find Paris attractive, but then I’m a hetero woman so I guess that doesn’t mean much. (Although OTOH, women like Jane Seymour… rowr!) I just find her so wholly annoying, that droopy-eyed posing that I think is meant to be sexy but to me comes off as drug-addled or just plain stupid. Ugh.
Therese, if it makes you feel any better, “The Beautiful People” look pretty much just like you and me. They just have stylists following them around everywhere touching up their hair and makeup, personal wardrobe people to pick out flattering clothes for them and expertly tailor everything, and it’s their job to stay thin and hegemonically “attractive”, so they have trainers, nutritionists, etc, work out 3 or 4 hours a day, and never eat anything that isn’t mega-healthy. You’d be just as “Beautiful” if you had those priorities and that entourage.
And if a “Beautiful Person” is mainly seen via the media (posed photos, pre-recorded TV and film appearances, etc.), keep in mind that everything is intensely choreographed to prioritize making the person in question look their best. If the actress was slouching, they’ll do another take. If the model made a weird face, they’ll pick a different shot.
alyssa, I like Paris’s nose. Any nose that isn’t puggish, that has a dip or bump or hook or some honkin’ heft appeals to me.
Wow it’s sad to read that so many self-declared feminists, with such positive views about other women’s beauty, can’t see the same beauty in themselves. Some sort of mutual appreciation society may be in order.
I work in the retouching business. This is standard operating procedure. I’ve seen worse, believe me. A lot of times celebrities don’t have time or patience for a styling session, these shoots are so rushed. We’ll just “fix” it later….
What I find interesting about the pictures is that the untouched one contains an actual smile. The retouched one contains a pose.
I have never, ever, ever had sex. Actually, no, there was that one time, but I’m pretty sure frottage is illegal in my state, so I can’t really elaborate on that.
[…] Pandagon linked to Jezebel about the Redbook Faith Hill cover work. […]
Another good look at how reality is being manipulated in this Dove ad:
“Manufacturing Beauty”
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/07/manufacturing-b.html
The only cult of personality allowed is the ‘Cult of Bush’…
In today’s over Xanax’ed, Ambien’ed, Lunesta’ed and Botox’ed populous, having a ‘personality’ is an invitation to free thinking and could lead someone to actually think about what is happening to this country rather than bouncing from ‘official statement’ and rumour like a hyperactive pinball… Such actions are to be avoided at all costs… When things get close to cognition the corporitocacy media brings out another side show to distract the sheeple…
Oh look: Michael Jackson, $400 haircuts, Paris Hilton, Al’s kid busted, White House ‘intelligence’ report… Oh, there’s Bin Laden… Illegal immigrants… Steam pipe explosions… Columbian plane crashes… Ooooo… Ahhhhhh…
That is without a doubt the best farking that I’ve seen. It’s also the same picture. Check out the line from the wall meeting the floor. Same pattern in both.
The pattern in the fabric near her arm. Same pattern…
Since I haven’t heard that Faith objected, I assume that she doesn’t mind the fakery which makes me wonder how the ‘before’ picture came out…
But, but..they took away her lovely crow’s feet?!!! I can’t believe that I’m the only person who thinks crow’s feet are lovely and charming.
I think that woman is beautiful before the airbrushes. I think it is an insult to her and all women that they changed her appearance to what they feel is “better”. It is not better nor honest. I think plastic fake pictures should be illegal. No wonder women struggle with vanity in North America with all this bullshit going on.
Paris Hilton had a nose job, so if you love her nose, you are really just enjoying the work of her plastic surgeon.
I’ve been talking about this for a while:
http://erin-obrien.blogspot.com/2007/06/trouble-with-tribbles-or-post-that-is.html
Then someone turned around and photoshopped me!
http://erin-obrien.blogspot.com/2007/06/holy-time-machines-batman-erin-obriens.html
Photoshop turns people into cartoons.
Partly, I’m seeing a picture taken by a photographer who didn’t take the time to properly pose or light his subject, and who didn’t give the hair and makeup people enough time to do their jobs either. I think that’s a lot of the weirdness in the shift, is that they don’t worry about the photo session itself so much because they can “fix it in post.”
That said, the left arm looks like one of those shooters of jungle vine that seems to grow 20 feet in one night. Quite bizarre.
I think she looks better without photoshop.
At least it looks like she has some personality and isn’t some mannequin! At least she looks like she’s alive!
Not to worry. In about 10 years (or less) they will dispense with the airbrushing all the way and simply create what look they want from digitized “good point” on the celebrity’s form.