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Re-touching. No, I won’t just ‘get over it’.


Three faces of Reese…..look how different her chin, eyes, nose and skin looks on these 3 covers..

I post about re-touching often here. How much I hate it. How damaging I think it is for all of us women and girls (and guys) who overtly or subconsciously compare ourselves to the fake images we see. Invariably, in the comments that follow such a post, I’m told to just ‘get over it’. Some fashion mag editors, when they’re asked about the practice dismissively insist ‘it’s just fantasy’, ‘people know what’s real and what’s not’.
To that, I say bullshit. And it seems that one of the world’s most famous fashion photographers, Peter Lindberg, agrees.
The New York Times reports:

Advances in digital photography have made it so easy to manipulate photographs that cover models often resemble weirdly synthesized creatures or, as the photographer Peter Lindbergh described them this week, “objects from Mars.”No one could reasonably argue that Gwyneth Paltrow’s skin is indeed made of Silly Putty, as it appeared to be on the May 2008 cover of Vogue, or that Jessica Simpson’s body comes with only one hip, though her left one was suspiciously missing on last September’s
cover of Elle, or wonder how the shape of Reese Witherspoon’s chin, dimples and eye color could change so drastically from her
angelic Marie Claire appearance in February 2008 to her polished Vogue cover in November to her kittenish Elle pose this April.

But as retouching has become more blatant and bizarre, sometimes resulting in bodies that defy the natural boundaries of human anatomy, a debate over photo manipulation has spilled into public view, with Mr. Lindbergh, one of the world’s most famous image makers, leading the charge against the practice.

“My feeling is that for years now it has taken a much too big part in how women are being visually defined today,” Mr. Lindbergh said in an e-mail exchange. “Heartless retouching,” he wrote, “should not be the chosen tool to represent women in the beginning of this century.”

Last month, Mr. Lindbergh stirred the pot by creating a series of covers for French Elle that showed stars like Monica Bellucci, Eva Herzigova and Sophie Marceau without makeup or retouching (see those images here). The issue struck a nerve with readers in France, where health officials were already campaigning for a measure to force magazines to note when and how images are altered. But editors of American publications, who last year resisted such a proposal within their trade group, the American Society of Magazine Editors, have also noted a backlash against images that appear manipulated to push an idealized standard of beauty.

It now seems fresh, even exclamation-worthy, when a magazine presents an unvarnished image. Last month, for example, an issue of Life & Style took the unusual step of declaring that a cover photograph of Kim Kardashian was “100 percent unretouched,” as if it had done a great service to the cause of pseudo-celebrity journalism. And People, in its “100 Most Beautiful” issue this month, included images of 11 celebrities “wearing nothing but moisturizer.”

“Fashion magazines are always about some element of fantasy,” said Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour, “but what I’m hearing from readers lately is that in fashion, as in every other part of our lives right now, there is a hunger for authenticity. Artifice, in general, feels very five years ago.”

Five years ago? So when will the fashion and advertising industries catch up? And until they do, I won’t shut up. Not until women who look like plastic aliens stop being held up as the ideal.