BONAE L'AMOUR

A World of Image Lies

The fashion world can be a beautiful and inspirational place; however, it is not all real and often glamorous. The images that are fed to the global audience are usually always overly photoshopped, airbrushed, and manipulated. Even if it is simply a streetstyle photograph, image makers usually spend a decent amount of time altering the picture.

By “photoshopped,” I am referring to not simply just adjusting lighting and contrast and/or removing a few random pimples, which I do sometimes. I am referring to altering the whole image (face and/or body) to support a standard and conservative idea of what is beautiful by our media world.

I find that photoshopping raises important ethical issues. These images of unrealistic and unattainable beauty are alarming because of their effects on young women. Actually, the images affect not only young women who are very susceptible and vulnerable to the media, but all women and all people no matter their gender.

I often wonder how many people are aware that ALL images in magazines and advertisements are photoshopped in some compacity. I wonder if young girls remind themselves that the perfections that they often see are not real.

And even if people are aware of the facts, do they look at the images nonchalantly acknowledging that it is not real, that even the woman or man in the picture does not look like that in real life? Do people say that to themselves for quick self-comfort alone, or do they actually understand the full reality that these images are just fantasies? Furthermore, do young people still grow up comparing their appearances to the computer generated interpretation of an unrealistic standard of beauty even though they know that the images have been altered with a lot of time and money?

It troubles me deeply that even the young models, who are championed by designers and casting directors in the fashion world as the representation of mass fashion and beauty, are self-conscious of their looks. Sometimes, I even hear, “I don’t look beautiful without makeup.” In fact, I hear that at least twice every fashion week I have ever covered.

Unfortunately, even in journalistic media these days, often nothing is real about the people in the photographs. In fact, many politicians have makeup artists and hair stylists on call.

In the pages of fashion magazines, the skin is smoothed and colored, all lines and spots of human imperfections are removed, body parts and limbs are erased and recreated, parts of faces are deleted and replaced with more symmetrical copies, and so many other things.

Personally, my simple rule is if I have to waste more than 2 minutes of my time with an image, it is just not worth sharing. I don’t do much more than lighting, color, and contrast adjustments. When I use the editing program Photoshop, 99.9% of the time, it is to just resize and relabel a photo. Maybe, I am a conservative. Maybe, I am a liberal. But at the end of the day, I consider myself a believer in true beauty- the kind of beauty that people think they can obviously identify by quickly glancing at a pretty girl or image. Sometimes, beauty can be simple or complex to explain. But ultimately, true beauty is reality and truth because that is what you fall asleep with and wake up to, and I hope our world will step towards embracing more of that instead of continuing to promote lies.

I grew up seeing too many young and matured women negatively affected by societal standards of beauty. I feel betrayed oftentimes having been raised in a culture that champions individualism and originality in textbooks and theory and also at the same time successfully sells and promotes conformity and standardized ideals. It breaks my heart.

And plainly, my ultimate motive here is for the future. If I ever have a child with someone I love, I would want for that little one; no matter if they are male or female, gay or straight or queer; to be able to live in a world that does not pressure and mainstream a standard idea on what is beautiful in regards to skin color, to height, to weight, to size, to everything in between. I hope for an open world where not only myself but others also truly believe that real beauty is beyond skin and that reality no matter how it looks is beautiful in its own obvious or peculiar way.

I recommend watching this and this.