We flip through magazines and we see airbrushed goddesses—Gigi Hadid bronzed and ready in a Guess ad, Cara Delevingne’s cheekbones contoured to kill. We cannot help it. We cannot help comparing ourselves to these femme fatales.
It’s not like these ladies are not beautiful and stunning in their own right.
The live Victoria Secret fashion show proves that Photoshop or not, some models make you want to drown in a pool of your own self-loathing tears.
But when even the ideal and flawless ladies are being reformatted by Photoshop into a unrealistic Barbie-like image, it’s enough to make a girl throw in the towel on self esteem all together.
They are models, i.e. perfect, i.e. what one “should” strive to look like. Yet even these paradigmatic archetypes of beauty are told they are not beautiful enough with magic tools that suck away fat and airbrush minor skin tone discrepancies.
By now Jean-Paul Goude’s photograph for Paper Magazine of Kim Kardashian has been seen by any and every American who’s address isn’t “under a rock.”
Most likely a large number of people have also seen the side-by-side comparison of the original unedited photo.
Kim’s waist is significantly less narrow, her rump is significantly less voluptuous and her face less gaunt.
Another photo setting unachievable standards circulating throughout the inter-webs.
As the public pronounces outrage over the edited images, advertising and beauty companies laugh with their overstuffed wallets.
Even when women recognize that virtually all images in magazines have been significantly altered they still end up buying the products depicted in these unachievable photos because, let’s face it, we all want to be beautiful.
And so that is where society is right now: outraged but still willing to buy into this unattainable image of beauty.