For when you're feeling down about your body

[winter]

Glamour photos of celebrities - before and after Photoshop

Mouse over the images and see how bellies and buttocks were tucked in, skins smoothed, arms narrowed, cellulite erased. And those are the beauty queens. Erases all complexes with a touch of the retouch brush.

(Gacked from pl.rec.uroda.)

Comments

[emudii.livejournal.com]

Wow. I think I feel sick now. :D;

[winter]

And this is the baseline real women are compared against. Hell, I have less cellulite and better stomach muscles than a lot of these women really have :/

[tehta.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you're probably much younger than them. I hate the inexorable march of time, I really do.

On a more positive note, these pictures have reminded me that everyone's skin does weird things when they do weird twisty poses. When I was a teenager, I thought I was a freak because I was the only one who seemed to have that...

[winter]

Yeah, I'm a staggering total two years younger than Venus Williams or Kelis ;) I doubt many of them are older than 20-something, and I'm getting closer to the middle of that range.

On a more positive note, these pictures have reminded me that everyone's skin does weird things when they do weird twisty poses.

If only more people remembered that, we might be spared the sight of too many women in too-tight clothing that resembles a pond with an octopus somewhere down making waves, every time they move ;)

[mayoini.livejournal.com]

There was an article on that in some woman's magazine, maybe glamour, last summer (I remember because I took it on the plane with me when going to Japan ^^;) and they took photos of a "normal" woman and using photoshop trasformed her into a "celebrity". ^^; And they explained it all step by step, that was cool. This woman who retouches photos is mostly seriously overdoing it for my taste... Ugh, her works don't even look like real people when you look closely... I mean, cosmopolitan came give Kate Winslet a vitrual liposuction, but they don't turn her into a kitschy virtual barbie doll. Eek. I don't like it. And everybody knows photos can be photoshopped. Who wants to be like someone they just saw in a photo anyway. :P I'm going to get dressed, I think, the time to do it has come. (It's 5pm. I suck so much. *sigh*).

[winter]

Heh, wait until you start working... I'm just gearing up to leave the office :P

I just think of the times I've heard guys (and girls) describe an average-weight woman as "OMG so fat", because they're comparing her to all those false photoshopped images ~_~ Or they think "she should look like Celebrity A", and they don't even know what Celebrity A's body looks like because they've never seen a real photo of her. And I think that's very much a Polish thing... there's lots and lots more skeleton-thin Polish girls than there are in Italy, and in Ireland there were none, period.

[muzivitch.livejournal.com]

A few weeks ago I read an interview with Heidi Klum. Her first shoot after having the baby is going to be for Victoria's Secret, and the interview asked what would happen if she hadn't lost all the weight.

She said something like: "They'll fix the picture. They'd fix the picture even if I was at my pre-pregnancy weight. No one looks the way models do in magazines in real life."

It's too bad more people don't realize this.

[winter]

Exactly. It's a little sad - over here in a class of 15-year-olds a friend teaches, half of them are borderline or clinically anorexic. And the rest want to be.

[muzivitch.livejournal.com]

Oh, it was the same way here when I was in high school. I remember angsting because there was no way in hell I was ever going to fit into a size two, seeing as I had hips and liked food.

[artela.livejournal.com]

Am I alone in thinking that some of them looked better *pre* photoshopping?

And the one where they tilted the foreground picture - would've been better if they'd noticed the mirror behind and photoshopped it to match *LOL* - talk about inattentive!

How are we supposed to try and measure up, though, if it's all make believe anyway - there are young girls out there seriously ill due to trying to look like this sort of unrealistic image :-/

[littleshebear.livejournal.com]

Am I alone in thinking that some of them looked better *pre* photoshopping?

No, I thought that too. The ones of Halle Berry where she actually had *gasp* one or two lines on her face in the non-airbrushed versions? She looked better there, IMO. In the retouched ones she looks like a waxwork. Some of them were totally over-done, no one's skin is THAT smooth and shiny.

[winter]

Definitely, especially the faces - you lose all expression with this kind of heavy airbrushing. But it was the tummies and the butts that pissed me off the most ;)

[mayoini.livejournal.com]

I was thinking the same thing too. :)

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Good lord, that's just scary. Mostly they're inflating boobs and butts, and smoothing out skin folds from odd postures, but the virtual tummy tucks and de-emphasis of bones are what freaks me out.

Especially when they soften the ribs and collarbones of models who are so underweight -- that's just going to make normal women looking at those people mad, thinking THAT is what they are supposed to look like.

They're not doing the same thing to the men, except for eliminating skin folds from weird poses. The only man who was a focus of picture just had the lighting changed for him. He wasn't enhanced in any way that I could really notice.

[winter]

Exactly - because it's all right for a guy to be decently muscular, but a woman has to be a skeleton. Check out the Kelis and Venus Williams photos - Kelis' arms get slimmed down by 50%, and Serena's muscles get heavily de-emphasized. It's just completely unnatural.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

They de-emphasize the muscles on an athelete? WTF