Mia Freedman Tuesday 29 March 2011 11:50am

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School kids aren’t good looking enough. Well, that’s the sentiment of one photography company in Western Australia which has offered parents the option of re-touching their child’s portrait using Photoshop for the princely sum of $15.

Andrea Mayes wrote in the West Australian:

“A spokesman for Fotoworks said the company was not doing anything wrong. He said the airbrushing only corrected minor skin issues and the company did not enhance photographs to remove braces or add missing teeth, for example.

“It’s mainly for pimples or other marks,” he said. “We leave it up to the parents and it’s a very minimal thing that we do.”

He said only a handful of parents each year chose the option.

Fotoworks photographers made every effort to fix imperfections during the photo shoot, such as asking children to face a different way or getting them to smile without showing their braces. “We would rather fix these things in camera than we would post-camera with photoshop and things like that, he said.”

This is about finding flaws in the school yard, but even already beautiful celebrities are having their ‘wrinkles’ Photoshopped away on the covers of magazines around the world. And they’re only in their 20s!

Emma Watson (Age 20)

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Perfect children. Flawless people. Is this what we’re aspiring to? Even female celebrities in their teens and twenties are being heavily digitally altered on magazine covers all over the world every month. So if a 20 year old actress is too ‘flawed’ to appear without extensive air-brushing? What hope is there for the rest of us? And who sets this ideal anyway?