Photoshopping, digital alteration, image manipulation, blah blah blah. Everyone talks about the fact that so many images of women are “perfected” with the help of technology, but do we really understand how serious this issue is? Like exactly HOW MUCH these photos are manipulated and changed to fit some seriously un-human and unrealistic ideals that we view over and over again? And do we understand that it isn’t just fashion magazine covers that feature photoshopped images? It’s everywhere.
While the vast majority of images of women are being digitally altered, so are our perceptions of normal, healthy, beautiful and attainable.
One of the main strategies used to reinforce and normalize a distorted idea of “average” is media’s representation of women as abnormally thin – either by consistent use of models and actresses that are underweight or close to it, or by making the models and actresses fit their idea of ideal thinness and beauty through digital manipulation. Essentially, “the feminine ideal is tanned, healthy slenderness, with no unsightly bumps, bulges or cellulite, and bodily and facial perfection that results from hours of labor: exercise, makeup and hair care” (Coward, 1985) – and 20 years later, plastic surgery and photoshopping. This unrealistic form is consistently represented across almost all media forms, along with blemish-free, wrinkle-free, and even pore-free skin, thanks to the wonders of digital manipulation as an “industry standard” that is openly endorsed and defended by magazine editors like Lucy Danziger of Self.
Though we hear about photoshopping controversies all the time (a few of which we’ll showcase below), media executives and producers continue to use it to an unbelievable extent and they violently defend it as a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Here’s an interesting (and appalling) case study from Self magazine to showcase this very issue:
Kelly Clarkson before and after Photoshop, Self magazine, Sept. '09
When superstar singer Kelly Clarkson was digitally slimmed down almost beyond recognition on Self’s September 2009 cover, people noticed. Her appearance on “Good Morning America” within just days of the cover shoot proved that her body did not look anything like the very thin one that appeared on the cover. In a shockingly ironic twist, the issue she appeared on was titled “The Body Confidence Issue” and featured an interview inside where she explained how comfortable she felt with her body:
“My happy weight changes,” Clarkson says in the September issue of SELF. “Sometimes I eat more; sometimes I play more. I’ll be different sizes all the time. When people talk about my weight, I’m like, ‘You seem to have a problem with it; I don’t. I’m fine!’ I’ve never felt uncomfortable on the red carpet or anything.”
Rather than apologizing for the seriously unethical and extreme Photoshopping snafu, Self editor Lucy Danziger tried to defend her magazine’s work to the death:
“Yes, of course we do post-production corrections on our images. Photoshopping is an industry standard,” she stated. “Kelly Clarkson exudes confidence, and is a great role model for women of all sizes and stages of their life. She works out and is strong and healthy, and our picture shows her confidence and beauty. She literally glows from within. That is the feeling we’d all want to have. We love this cover and we love Kelly Clarkson.”
Interestingly, Danziger wasn’t satisfied with that statement and felt inspired to take to her personal blog to further rationalize away the Photoshopping hack job:
“Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best…But in the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then I think this photo is the truest we have ever put out there on the newsstand.”
It’s hard to believe anyone’s “personal best” is a fake representation of herself. They’ll plaster “body confidence!” all over the magazine and quote Kelly talking about her own real body confidence, but they refuse to show us her actual body.
This is just one example that happened to generate enough media coverage that people were able to find out about the scary distortion of an active, 27-year-old superstar’s body in media. Unfortunately, this case study is pretty representative of thousands more that appear in magazines, on billboards, in advertisements, in stores and everywhere else you can think of every single day. At Beauty Redefined, we’ve termed this phenomenon “the normalization of abnormal.” Since we’ll see millions more images of women in media than we’ll ever see face-to-face, those images form a new standard for not just “beautiful,” but also “average” and “healthy” in our minds. When women compare themselves to a standard of beautiful, average and healthy that simply doesn’t exist in real life, the battle for healthy body image is already lost.
Women’s Health Losses and Media Powerholder Gains
From lost self-esteem, lost money and time spent fixing “flaws” and a well-documented preoccupation with losing weight (National Eating Disorders Association, 2010), the “truth effects” of beauty ideology involve serious loss for women, while the ruling class sees only economic gains. While we know that advertising – especially for fashion or beauty products – depends on people believing they can achieve physical ideals by using certain products or services, do we really understand that ALL media (with very few exceptions) depends on advertising dollars to operate? Because of that, the editorial content or programming has to uphold those same ideals or else advertisers aren’t happy.
Same model, differing degrees of Photoshopping on REAL printed ads, Oct. 2009. Ralph Lauren responded: "After further investigation, we have learned that we are responsible for the poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman's body. We have addressed the problem and going forward will take every precaution to ensure that the caliber of our artwork represents our brand appropriately."
One telling example from the ‘90s (found in Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth”) explains how a prominent women’s magazine featured gray-haired models in a fashion spread (unheard of even today, right?). It was a success until one of their biggest advertisers, Clairol hair color company, pulled their entire campaign as a protest against the spread. The magazine, which depended on those advertising dollars, was forced to never again feature gray-haired women in a positive light. The same holds true for media today. Pay attention to what kind of companies are advertising in your favorite magazines or during your favorite TV shows. There’s a very good chance they are selling beauty products, weight loss products or other appearance-related services, which means the female characters featured positively (like in relationships or pursued by men, complimented, not the butt of jokes, etc.) will likely resemble the idealized women in the advertising.
From media outlets like Self, Redbook, Ann Taylor and GQ (illustrated below) that go to great lengths to make unrealistic and unattainable beauty ideals look normal and within reach, to the diet and weight loss industry raking in an estimated $61 billion on Americans’ quest for thinness in 2010 (Marketdata Enterprises, 2009), those with financial interests at stake in our beliefs about women’s bodies are thriving unlike ever before. Simultaneously, women and families are losing. Losing self-esteem. Losing time and money spent on items, services and products meant to fix our never-ending list of “flaws.” Losing real understandings of healthy, average and attainable. Sometimes even losing weight they didn’t need to lose in order to measure up (or down) to photoshopped ideals we see every day as “normal.”
Former high fashion model, Crystal Renn, battled a deadly eating disorder for many years before deciding to switch to "plus size" modeling for health purposes. Photographer and Fashion for Passion founder Nicholas Routzen said that Crystal looked thinner because the photos were “…taken from a higher angle with a wider lens,” but that“I shaped her … I did nothing that I wouldn’t do to anyone. I’m paid to make women look beautiful.”
While representations of women’s bodies across the media spectrum have shrunk dramatically in the last three decades, rates of eating disorders have skyrocketed – tripling for college-age women from the late ‘80s to 1993 and rising since then to 4% suffering with bulimia (National Eating Disorder Association, 2010). Perhaps even more startling is the 119 percent increase in the number of children under age 12 hospitalized due to an eating disorder between 1999 and 2006, the vast majority of whom were girls (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2010). Though the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2000) reports that “no exact cause of eating disorders have yet been found,” they do admit that some characteristics have been shown to influence the development of the illnesses, which include low self-esteem, fear of becoming fat and being in an environment where weight and thinness were emphasized – all of which are shown to be related to media depictions of idealized bodies, which is all but inescapable. Scholars have proposed that eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia are due, in part, to an extreme commitment to attaining the cultural body ideal as portrayed in media.
Photoshopping has taken these unreal ideals to a scary new level.
Henry Farid, a Dartmouth professor of computer science who specializes in digital forensics and photo manipulation, agrees. “The more and more we use this editing, the higher and higher the bar goes. They’re creating things that are physically impossible,” he told ABC News in August 2009. “We’re seeing really radical digital plastic surgery. It’s moving towards the Barbie doll model of what a woman should look like — big breasts, tiny waist, ridiculously long legs, elongated neck. All the body fat is removed, all the wrinkles are removed, the skin is smoothed out.”
What we see in media, and what we may be internalizing as normal or beautiful, is anything but normal or beautiful. It’s fake. It’s a profit-driven idea of normal and beautiful that women will spend their lives trying to achieve and men will spend their lives trying to find. But until we all learn to recognize and reject these harmful messages about what it means to look like a woman, we all lose. And I don’t want to lose.
Check out our gallery of photoshopping phoniness and then share this truth!
Ann Taylor's online photoshopping ad disaster, August 2010
This scary display of digital manipulation in action was caught on popular clothing store Ann Taylor’s website in August 2010, when the women behind the feminist website Jezebel discovered the “before” image (on the left, obviously) being displayed while the scary skinny ”after” the image loaded. The already stunning model’s hips and thighs were shrunk to dangerously thin proportions, but her waist simply looks ridiculous.
After Jezebel reported the glitch (and thank goodness for that!), Ann Taylor fixed it and sent an apology their way, saying, “We want to support and celebrate the natural beauty of women, and we apologize if, in the process of retouching, that was lost. We agree, we may have been overzealous on some retouching but [going] forward we’ll make sure to feature more real, beautiful images.” Unfortunately, Ann Taylor is a notorious repeat offender.
Faith Hill retouched to oblivion on the July 2007 cover of Redbook
Right arm? Suddenly appeared on the cover. Left arm? Cut down by at least 1/3 of its original size. Wrinkles, normal complexion or any other signs of life on her face? Erased. Back? Sliced out almost entirely. Enough said.
Kate Winslet slimmed beyond recognition on the Jan. '03 GQ cover
Acclaimed actress Kate Winslet is notoriously beautiful and curvaceous, so it’s not surprising men’s magazine GQ would want to include her on their cover. What IS surprising is that they removed her curves entirely, leaving stick-thin legs and a rightfully upset actress.
She told Britain’s GMTV, “I don’t want people to think I was a hypocrite and had suddenly gone and lost 30 pounds, which is something I would never do, and more importantly, I don’t want to look like that! … They made my legs look quite a bit thinner. They also made me look about 6 feet tall, which I’m not – I’m 5 foot, 6 inches.”
The photoshopping phoniness continues:
Jessica Alba photoshopped dramatically in Dec. 2008 advertising for Campari.
Even Sandra Bullock's arm is not her own in this Photoshop fail! As you can see, digital manipulation is NOT limited to magazines Actress Mena Suvari (as well as any other female featured in print and much of broadcast media) is retouched here to get rid of any signs of life like pores, bumps, or other "blemishes!"
Katie Couric can't even escape photo retouching's grasp! Here, in promotion of her new anchor and managing editor post at CBS Evening News, she is slimmed down by at least one third
America Ferrara on the cover of Glamour, Sept. 2007. Sources claim her head was cut and pasted onto another woman's body for the shoot.
Kourtney Kardashian, just 7 days after having her baby, is featured on the cover of January 2010's OK Magazine. It looks as though she dropped her baby weight in one week!
For a glimpse of reality, go HERE for pictures of 10 real women with their real weights and sizes — in all their beautiful, unaltered glory!
So if you want to
slap a sticky note on the next magazine cover in the grocery aisle to remind passersby of things like “There is more to BE than eye candy!” and “You are capable of much more than being looked at!” Please click here! It’s one of our new favorite pastimes!
The thing is, I think the before photos are so much prettier… so much more… HUMAN-looking!
AGREED!
I 2nd that!
I just had to share this with my blog readers. After reading it and seeing the before and after pictures, I said to my husband, “No wonder women hate their bodies.” Thanks for sharing this, hopefully the more of us are talking about real beauty and its distortion, the more women and girls will begin to question the ideals that are presented to them. Love it!
Wonderful! Thanks for sharing – and feel free to use our work anytime. The more people that recognize the UNreality of what we see all day every day, the better. You appear to be doing wonderful work on behalf of women as well! Love it!
How amazing is that, it’s interesting that it was even that way.
I find the Kourtney Karsdashian photo the most offensive….bec as a mom of young kids, the pressure to bounce back in weeks (days!) is just nuts.
There’s actually a great post about this (specifically Mommy Makeovers) on the Illusionists right now (http://theillusionists.org/?p=1580) which is another great body image website. Worth checking out!
Wonderful! Thanks for the link. And you are so right! The post-pregnancy pressure to “get your body back” (which is a RIDICULOUS phrase we’re looking into for a new post right now…) is a whole new level of crazy – and the Kourtney Kardashian photo is living proof of its craziness! Thanks for your comment!
YES! so agree with you Audrey! and most are nursing..which means you cannot be dieting and starving your body.
Share this and change the message out there. Who is deciding this ideal? Women? Men?
Fashion designers who don’t want to waste their fabric? ;-)
I’m so thankful there are still people who take care of such irritating issues! Even if one considers herself well informed, it’s disturbing to see the degree in which photos of celebrities are being manipulated and along with them our minds and standarts. I am disgusted by the photoshopped pic of Ann Taylor! It’s below size zero..so unnatural. I hope you know how wonderful your project is! It really is about time to redefine beauty! And wht you do is beautiful. Thank you.
I am a photographer. I use photoshop. I think it’s like makeup… less is more. photoshop in and of itself isn’t bad, but it can be taken to extreme in the wrong hands. JMHO. It all depends on ones perception of beauty. But as digital artists there is a responsibility in the message you are sending.
Thank you for your effort to expose the truth of the overwhelming media images we are influenced by every day. I have treated women for over a decade and whether they are coming to me to have a baby, hault hot flashes, or reduce anxiety…they all have one thing in common: They don’t like the way they look. It’s so heart breaking. I too have fallen victim to these savage images that pervade every inch of our society.
Thank you for sharing the truth! Thank you for celebrating the women AS THEY ARE! We must come together and stop the madness. Keep up the great work.
Sincerely,
Kristen Lohman Burris, L.Ac., M.S.T.O.M
Women’s Health Expert
“Losing real understandings of healthy, average and attainable.”
Yes! And this loss is huge, with dire consequences for the young women of this country.
This is such a great article! Thank you for sharing.
It’s actually obscene. Magazines are supposed to be nonfiction. I know of newspaper photographers who were fired (one was called out for photoshopping a leg out of a sports photo) for using Photoshop for journalistic endeavors. Just goes to show you that these magazines are not selling the truth about anything. It’s just fantasy.
While I disagree with editing women’s bodies, I also strongly disagree with the hateful attitude toward very thin women in both the article and the comments section. Why can’t we just say, “that’s not how the model really looks, and that is wrong” rather than, “oh, that photoshopped image looks so disgusting and abnormal”. Believe it or not, some women DO look like that through no “fault” of our own. It’s called having a high metabolism, which is not unhealthy. For some of us, it truly is natural to be below a size 0. We can’t gain weight no matter how much we eat. I’ve been bullied for my thinness my whole life, and a site this shouldn’t promote that same hatred.
Dawn, Please point out exactly where in the article you find a “hateful attitude toward very thin women.” This is NOT our attitude and promoting negative attitudes toward any body size or shape goes against everytihng Beauty Redefined stands for, so if you are interpreting something in our writing that way, please point it out specifically. We don’t take that kind of accusation lightly. The problem with this extreme Photoshopping is that it is often used to manipulate women’s bodies into a size they aren’t, whether or not anyone else (like you) fits that standard. We have plenty of friends and loved ones with the same body type/size as you, and would fight long and hard for every one of them to recognize their beauty and worth in a world that shames them and promotes feelings of inadequance in very similar ways as it does to anyone larger than a size 2. No one EVER fits the ideal, whether thin or otherwise (as demonstrated by extreme Photoshopping of models and actresses), and that’s the point of the ideals. Though we don’t claim to endorse every comment left on this site or our Facebook page, we do stand behind the content we’ve written and would NEVER endorse shaming of natural thinness.
Let me first make clear that I too disagree with photoshopping and with media promoting a narrow beauty ideal (or any ideal, really) and lack of diversity. Fat-shaming and thin-shaming are just different sides of the same coin.
Some quotes from your article:
“abnormally thin” – yes, because anyone who is deemed underweight MUST be abnormal!
“scary skinny” – even though the image you’re referring to is fake, some of us really do look that “scary”.
“The already stunning model’s hips and thighs were shrunk to dangerously thin proportions” – really? So if your hips and thighs are naturally that thin, you must be in danger?
“stick-thin legs” – this is an insult hurled at very thin women and is never complimentary. Again, although the image itself is fake, there’s not need to insult women who really look like that.
Dawn thanks for being more specific. Now I can address those!
“abnormally thin” is a statement of fact and not of judgment. The level of thinness represented by those images is not normative in any culture. All “abnormally thin” means is that it is outside of the norm and taken to an extreme. It is not intended as an insult.
“scary skinny,” as you pointed out, is referring to a specific image that was manipulated beyond the point of looking realistic for that model.
“Dangerously thin proportions” is another statement of fact and not of judgment. For the vast majority of women in the U.S. (around 92%), those proportions are without a doubt dangerously thin. Most women’s bodies can not sustain a healthy life at that size and shape, even if you can. That doesn’t mean you specifically are in danger of health risks, but almost all women in the U.S. would be if they reached those proportions.
“Stick-thin legs” was not meant to be intended as an insult, but I can see how it could be taken that way – especially considering your sensitivity to this term based on your life experience. In the context of the article, it was referring to the extreme manipulation of Kate Winslet’s thighs: “What IS surprising is that they removed her curves entirely, leaving stick-thin legs and a rightfully upset actress.” All we’re saying is they left her with extremely thin legs that look nothing like her own. If it’s our use of the words “stick thin” that you take issue with, I apologize for the using a phrase that has negative connotations for you, but we did not use it or mean it as an insult to anyone with thin legs.
I have to go with Dawn on this one. While the Photoshopping is wrong (as is the suggestion that women should be of a certain size), it seems like you are doing precisely what you accuse Self Magazine of doing – trying to defend conduct which is not reasonably defensible. I didn’t see any mention in the article that Kelly Clarkson (or anyone else) is “frighteningly fat” or “dangerously overweight” in their original photo, and no mention of “tree trunk-like legs”. I think a mea culpa is seriously warranted here.
I think I’m with Dawn (and Mark), too. This article could have been written, and been just as effective at conveying the intended message (i.e. photoshop is bad) without the above references.
I would like to address, in particular, the reference to “abnormally thin”. You defend this as a statement of fact and as a reference to the fact that women aren’t normally that size. You say, “All ‘abnormally thin’ means is that it is outside of the norm and taken to an extreme. It is not intended as an insult”.
The Oxford dictionary defines abnormal as, “deviating from what is normal or usual, *typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying*”.
Abnormal suggests that someone deviates from usual or accepted standards…and I thought we were trying to shun the concept of a “standard” body? The word “abnormal” is generally considered to have negative connotations.
Beauty redifined, you reinforce Dawn’s attack by saying abnormally thin is a statement of fact about the image. What about real women who are that thin and healthy? Instead of trying to label things nomal or abnormal promote the idea that woman can be thin, plump, and anywhere in between and be beautiful. There is no such thing as normal because no women have the exactlly the same body shape or type. Even twins differ in some ways.
I am a man and a photographer, and I love this article. Photoshop is good for correcting bad lighting, for creating “art” out of a photograph, and for getting rid of the occasional unwanted element (a street sign). But when it comes to people, I have always found the magazine covers so grossly overdone as to become unappealing. The “model” thinness is frightful – meaning yes, it actually creeps me out. While I’ve had people ask me on occasion, “can you make me thinner in Photoshop?” I have always responded with a resounding “No. I’m a photographer, not an anime engineer.” It’s what I call “cheap,” and when it’s done en masse, it creates a false element to culture that, as this article suggests, wreaks havoc on young women’s concept of beauty – and young men’s, too, for that matter. The really GOOD photographers are the ones that capture beauty naturally, and don’t have to resort to extraordinary edits to make up for their own lack of an artistic eye.
I have been fairly slender my entire life, only in the last few years I have put on about 10 pounds…let me tell you, since gaining that weight, I have been getting WAY more male attention. Curves are where it is at.
Reminds me of the scene of two women at a bar – a blonde and a brunette. The brunette says to the obviously surgecially enhanced blonde, “Those things aren’t even real!” To which the blonde replies, “Like men even care.”
OK! even manipulated the photo of Kourtney Kardasian’s newborn. To think you can “improve” a baby?! Now that’s arrogance.
Not really. Anyone who’s had a baby will tell you a 1 weeks old usually has a lot of baby acne and most (if not all) newborn photos must be photoshopped for that reason.
For some really egregious photo shopping, check out the new pictures of Karlie Kloss (http://www.theimproper.com/fashion/4765/karlie-kloss-stunning-yet-disturbing-in-vogue-italia-photos). In some of them, she quite clearly would have to have no internal organs. And this is a woman who is already incredibly thin as a former ballet dancer. And there are people raving over how great they look and how it’s nice to see someone who isn’t “fat”. It’s awful.
Some of those photoshop jobs are just over the top. I understand why they do it though. Despite what a lot of people will say like better, more copies of magazines are sold with photoshopped cover models rather than covers that are unretouched. If enough people banded together and refused to buy, then they might listen, but they would have to be significantly losing profit for them to even give a hoot.
My daughter did a photo shoot for Dove brand beauty products that appeared in the 2- 2010 editions of Seventeen magazine. There were 2 other young women there who were doing Dove ads for other magazines.
Dove insisted that they not be given any hair extensions, or false eyelashes and that the photo effects should be achieved through lighting, not photoshopping.
The resulting 2 page ad spreads were of healthy confident young women.