Occasionaly I'll have a bride ask me to 'fix' something; a zit here, a weird mark there. It's no big deal, and photoshop is a wonderful and amazing tool. In fact, I love photoshop - it has helped me make some of my rather ordinary photos extraordinary. However, (and my photographer friends might be cringing at me saying this), it can also be a dangerous thing. Especially when it comes to how we, as people, and women, (and I'm thinking about my daughters especially here), view ourselves. I wanted to show you this. Click here to check it out.
I love the Dove campaign for
Real Beauty. The video is quite an eye opener. Pun intended. ;) (And no, it's not that shot of all those regular women in underwear.)
The link is to a somewhat crazy video showing how a real woman looks without makeup, and then how she looks after a hair and makeup team, and computer wizardry, It's amazing how different she looked before the team of people put her together, and before she was highly manipulated in the computer. They never put a raw image into a magazine any more -- there are always tweaks. Always, and some things you'd never dream could be or would be tweaked, usually are. Pretty much everything you see in magazines is fake. There was even a big recent kerfluffle about Katie Couric's virtual nip and tuck? Did you see the photo differences? I've posted them here for you to see.
I know this is my work blog, and I usually keep things relatively light, however, the most beautiful people I know are my very imperfect (by magazine standard) friends, and more beautiful than anyone (to me), my daughters, and it's not their perfectly proportioned bodies that make them beautiful, or their white-white teeth, or ski-jump noses (although, I have to be honest and admit my love for sliding my finger down my girls' pert little button noses). What I think is beautiful about my girls and my friends, and loved ones, is who they are, and who God made them to be, warts (sometimes literally) and all. It's a bit disheartening to see that a tool that is so important (and so useful) in my industry, has also been used, (even if inadvertently) against women. It's created a false and unattainable sense of beauty. And yet, most women don't realize that what they're looking at in the magazines, and ads, is fake, and not real. So what they're looking at isn't even real. And I can't stand that, so forgive my soapbox-action, but I wanted you to know - you're beautiful - even moreso without the airbrushing. (But I'll remove that zit if it's bugging you). =)