There’s a lot of chatter in the beauty realm. Some positive, uplifting, and fantastic. Some catty, hateful, and rude. Others are debate-worthy, but fall on neither side of the spectrum. One hot debate topic in this realm is whether or not it using Photoshop or other image editing techniques on beauty photos is acceptable.
The way I see it, there are two sides to this coin.
It is widely known that advertisers retouch their photos before publishing them, especially in the clothing industry. This isn’t to talk about whether or not I agree with that practice, but instead to suggest that they either a) hire qualified graphic designers/retouchers or b) beef up their proofing process before publishing photos:
Golly gee, something doesn’t look quite right here. Are you SUUUURE that’s a normal model right there? Call me a skeptic. It seems as though Target is batting 1000 lately between not having beefy enough protections in place to protect customers’ credit card information, and now, bad awkward Photoshop work.
A lot of people and news outlets are up in arms about the whole thigh gap thing – and while I definitely do think it is stupid and not realistic (also, not to be crude but having an unnatural crevasse separating one side of your body from the other looks, well, unnatural) but that’s not what I’m fired up about. I am, however, utterly baffled by how ridiculous this is. If there is a proofing or double-checking process, clearly it was missed – and if there isn’t, they desperately need one. Oh yeah let’s just lift the center of the model’s crotch up a good inch or two. That doesn’t look absolutely ridiculous at all. One other thing is that people commenting on this ‘shop fail seem to be disregarding how silly the model’s hand looks – look at the left side of the image. Oops.
The product, which used to live here, has since been taken down. Hopefully they’ll reshoot or upload an image that wasn’t butchered. Damn it guys, cut it out and get a better graphics team if you must retouch your photos because this flavor of marketing is just embarrassing. This doesn’t even just look shopped, it looks like it was done with mspaint.exe. This doesn’t fool anyone, and isn’t even aesthetically pleasing from a narrow-minded Barbie-esque view of beauty.