Via feministe, a perfect demostration of why I quit reading most mainsteam magazines several years back: The Art of Retouching.
Not only am I bombarded solely with images of women who are considered culturally the most attractive – excluding all the other women in the world – but those images are fake. No wonder my confidence in my looks would plummet after paging through one of those magazines.
A friend in Atlanta just posted a link to a German study done on cultural assumptions of beauty. The English version of their site is http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/index.htm.
From the summary: “To sum up, our study shows clearly that the most attractive faces do not exist in reality, they are morphs, i.e. computer-created compound images you would never find in everyday live. These virtual faces showed characteristics that are unreachable for average human beings.”
The vast majority of the time I thought they looked better before. The retouching seemed, to me, to be mostly a cheap hack for fixing the photographer’s failure to light well. Also, it seemed to make African-Americans look orange.
The photographer’s failure to light well probably didn’t cause the necessity to change backsides and breasts. And the fakeness of the skin! That’s what really gets me. No undereye shadows, no scars, no dimpling, no acne allowed. Obviously I should just get a can of tinted spackle and go to town before I leave the house in the morning.
I think the thing that was most surprising to me was the removal of any, even tiny, “rolls” of flesh – under the arms, or near a bent torso – that must exist in real, non-plastic bodies. Knees, elbows, and shoulder junctures are also perfectly, artificially smooth. Very weird. (It was great to meet you at BlogHer!)