Women’s magazines punish us with their gorgeous photographs of Cameron Diaz’s ass and snappy diet ideas on the next page.
—Anna Johnson, author
How do cover lines like “Resize Your Thighs,” “Blast Belly Fat,” and “Take Ten Years Off Your Face” strike you? A tad insulting, perhaps? Most likely. Because the message being sent is that you, dear reader, are in need of resizing, fat-blasting, and age-defying. And it doesn’t stop there. Every month, from every cover, the magazines scream some new directive that assumes you’re not good enough as you are: “Get Thinner.” “Get Prettier.” “Exercise More.” “Quit Looking Your Age.” “Younger is Better.”“Thinner Is Best.” “Put Down that Ding Dong, Dammit!”
Geez, can’t a woman get a break already? Not only is this messaging ridiculous and depressing, it promotes a false beauty ideal that’s largely unattainable for the average woman. Unlike the models and celebrities gracing these pages, we can’t airbrush off our arm flab, stretchmarks, wrinkles, tummy pooch, or the cellulite we’re genetically predisposed to, and it takes more than a crash diet and a few sets of donkey kicks to achieve and maintain the tight ass and flat belly of the fitness model who’s showing us these moves.
But hey, keep trying, these magazines tell us. Keep reaching for the holy grail of beauty we’re holding out just beyond your grasp, the one that makes you feel fat, frumpy, and forsaken. And since you’re clearly having such an impossible time achieving this standard, we’re only too happy to continue providing you with articles and advertisements that tout (unrealistic) solutions to being less fat, frumpy, and forsaken.
Gee, thanks.
Month after month, chick slicks illustrate how to lose weight, look younger, erase fine lines, whiten teeth, smooth rough skin, buy the best treadmill, and whittle ourselves down to their ideal size 0—no matter what your body type and height.
While the average woman is five foot four inches tall and wears a size 12, the magazines are filled with women who are five eleven and wear a size 2. They all seem to hover in the twentysomething age bracket, and their bodies are as mythic as Greek goddesses, whether sporting bikinis for magazines like Fitness and Shape or decked out in couture for the covers of Vogue and Elle. No wonder we feel like schlumpadinks.
According to one study conducted by researchers at the University of Missouri, after just one to three minutes of exposure to the types of images routinely found in women’s magazines, young women hate themselves more than they already do.1
The female standard, according to the study, is represented by a woman who wears a size 4 in the hips, a size 2 in the waist, and rocks a size-10 bust. The study reiterates that this is “thinner than the average woman and genetically impossible for most women to attain.” But are we all really lacking such backbones? Do we feel badly we don’t look like the women in the magazines? Apparently, some of us do.
The authors of the study reported that whether a participant was “thin or heavy, confident or prone to self-objectification, the result was the same: the women were equally affected by viewing the images of thin women and showed increased body dissatisfaction after viewing appearance-related images.”
The study was made up of eighty-one European American women split into two groups. One looked at ten “neutral” advertisements: ads with images that did not include people. The other group looked at five “neutral” advertisements and five “appearance-related” ads. The ads pictured European American women who were said to “embody cultural ideals of thinness and attractiveness.”
No wonder we’ve become a nation of fad dieters and disordered eaters.
MAGAZINE DIETS DU JOUR
Women’s magazines tout a few basic concepts, but diet, aging, and beauty are tops. In particular, these glossies are masters at hammering home weight loss as an issue. Month in and month out they promise to help you shed unwanted pounds, once and for all. Since 45 percent of women are always on a diet, what better way to sell subscriptions? In fact, weight loss is a $40 billion mega industry for which these magazines are largely to thank.2
In this month’s cover headlines on my coffee table alone, Woman’s Day shouts, “Real-Life Diet Tricks That Work”; Self proclaims, “Yes! You Can Have DIET SUCCESS”; Ladies’ Home Journal touts, “A Swimsuit That Looks Good on You”; Women’s Health screams, “Look Great Naked”; and Redbook asks, “Ready for a Slimmer, Happier You?”
GLOSSY FACT
Most magazine diets are based on eating 1,200–1,500 calories per day of fruits, veggies, and lean proteins, which isn’t too far off the government recommended intake of 1,600 calories per day for women. Kudos to them for not promoting starvation diets, but there’s a catch. According to the Centers for Disease Control, it takes approximately 3,500 calories below your calorie needs to lose a pound of body fat.3 So to lose, say, about one to two pounds per week (which some of these headlines tell you can happen), a woman has to reduce her calorie intake by 500–1,000 calories per day. No wonder dieting is a bitch!
In article after article, magazines claim if you just master their diet tips and tricks, it’s effortless. The problem is, it’s not.
Statistics show that the average dieter begins and breaks four diets a year, and that only one in every one hundred people who goes on a diet succeeds in losing weight permanently. The rest gain it back again, often putting on an additional 10 percent more than they shed in the first place.4 And the magazines seem to know this. Otherwise, how could they sell us a similar cover line the very next month if we had followed their diet and lost the weight just four weeks before? We buy right into their fat, frumpy beauty myth that we won’t ever lose weight without these articles in these magazines.
How does that make us feel? Stressed, discouraged, maybe even a little fatalistic. And surprise, surprise, research shows that stress and depression are primary reasons diets fail. A survey of 17,000 women showed that 99 percent of people who broke their diets did so because they were stressed, depressed, or bored.5 Essentially, it’s the emotional component, not a lack of willpower, that causes diets to fail. Thus, when it comes to magazines, women readers who are concerned about body image (and who isn’t, after skimming these glossies?) are caught up in a fairly negative yo-yo dieting loop that keeps them coming back, month after month, in what seems a pretty clear cycle of unhealthy codependence.
GLOSSY FACT
A 2011 Glamour magazine survey revealed that 97 percent of women say thirteen negative body thoughts to themselves daily like “I hate my stomach” or “I’m ugly.”6
Sadly this obsession costs us. As you learned in chapter 3, advertising and thin ideals are shown to contribute significantly to low self-esteem and body image issues, which are shown to lead to extreme eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia. But what of the middle-grounders? The hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of women who, while they haven’t fallen into that awful vortex, are nonetheless using some form of disordered eating to address body image issues? You know, the ones always trying to shed those last five to ten pounds.
In an ironic but laudable twist, Self magazine—a mainstay of the Pink Ghetto—partnered with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a 2008 survey of women and dieting. Of the more than 4,000 women who responded, they found 65 percent of American women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five reported having disordered eating behaviors, and eating habits that women thought were normal—like banishing carbs, skipping meals, and crash dieting—were in fact symptoms of disordered eating.7
Although the methods of disordered eating the survey uncovered aren’t deadly, like anorexia nervosa or bulimia, women reported that—surprise!—their eating behaviors were the results of emotional and physical stress. Although you might think eating disorders only affect teens and young women, the survey found that women in their thirties and forties suffer from disordered eating at the same alarming rates as young women.
Readers Respond
“I think magazines and ads have somehow decided what is beautiful for us. Now that I’m older, I’m more aware of it and stay away from them as much as I can. The last time I purchased a magazine—about ten years ago—it was for an article titled ‘10 Easy Ways to Lose Fat.’ When one of the ‘ways’ was to switch from oatmeal, which had 3 grams of fat, to cream of wheat, which had 0 grams of fat, I thought, really, is that what’s holding me back?”
—Ann, court reporter
That’s an important distinction, since women’s magazines seem to approach beauty, body image, and dieting advice as if we were still twenty-five.
The problem is, our body changes significantly as we age. Our metabolism slows down, gravity’s relentless pull shifts our flesh southward, muscle tissue is harder to maintain, pregnancy and childbirth leave their own irrevocable marks, and changes in lifestyle and athletic ability slow our caloric burn.
According to Dr. Pamela Peeke, author of Body for Life, women begin to lose muscle tissue at an average of about half a pound per year, beginning at age forty. When we lose muscle, our resting metabolism dips, and we burn fewer calories.8 Thus, unlike younger women, not only do we typically gain weight once we hit forty, we have a much harder time losing it.
You wouldn’t know it, looking at the relentless parade of flawless forty- and fifty-something celebrities who appear monthly in magazines without a sag, bulge, or wrinkle to show for their longevity. Talk about the pressure to age gracefully! (More on aging in chapter 6.) Sure, some spend literally hours every day maintaining that perfect shape (think Jennifer Aniston), but what about all the small indignities, like sagging skin, wrinkles, cellulite—all hallmarks of an aging woman—that we don’t see?
THE ERA OF AIRBRUSHING
When it comes to authenticity about aging and beauty, some magazines have made gestures toward full disclosure. In September 2002, MORE magazine published a bold piece on Jamie Lee Curtis, titled “True Thighs.” Curtis, who graced the cover in pearls and a slinky black gown, was made up to perfection, then posed for the cover story inside the magazine barefoot, without makeup, wearing nothing but a simple black bra and matching granny panties looking refreshingly like a real woman, au naturel.
It was her idea.
The article, rare in the magazine industry at the time, centered on the unattainable beauty ideal that magazines play up to, and offered that glam Jamie had been primped and packaged to perfection, then retouched mercilessly for the pages of previous women’s books. “In reality,” MORE proudly exclaimed, “Ms. Curtis has a saggy size-B cup, flabby thighs, and back fat.”
Although readers admired the hell out of Jamie for being so brazen, and thanked the MORE editors for reminding them that magazine photos are retouched and perfected so the subject looks like Barbie, not much has changed in the magazine industry as a result. What’s more, it’s only gotten worse. The photos of celebrities and models are regularly retouched in every magazine, making it the new norm; advertisements, as you read in chapter 3, have been banned for doing the same; and celebrities are pampered, glammed up, and styled to appear as gorgeous as they never were.
Comedic actress Aisha Tyler underwent a similar epiphany in the pages of a September 2005 issue of Glamour, claiming, “I don’t want to be Perfect,” complete with before and after photos of the retouch, showing readers that celeb women, even the Julia Roberts and the Angelina Jolies of the world, aren’t really flawless after all. Ironically, Glamour—which has been taken to task often for retouching—asked Aisha to participate in the piece to show how overzealous magazine retouching had become.
Glamour printed not only the before and after versions of Aisha’s photos, complete with the original notes of what needed to be retouched, including “brighten and whiten eyes, erase all blemishes and freckles, smooth neck wrinkles, and add cleavage shadows.” Who knew cleavage shadows were so desirable?
Aisha wondered in the Glamour article if the retouching instructions were over the top for the point of the story, and perhaps so, but she commented that her photos appeared “robot-like,” with a glow that didn’t radiate from within: “So the next time you see some model or actress with perfect skin, thighs like reeds, and eyes like shimmering pools . . . remember: it’s all a big load of digital crap.”9
Unfortunately, not all magazines step up, nor fess up, when called on the controversial issue of photo retouching. When Kelly Clarkson got a Photoshop diet in the August 2009 edition of Self, Editor-in-Chief Lucy Danziger defended it as “art.” In a response published on the Self.com blog in August 2009, she wrote: “Portraits like the one we take each month for the cover of Self are not supposed to be unedited or a true-to-life snapshot. This is art, creativity, and collaboration. It’s not, as in a news photograph, journalism. It is, however, meant to inspire women to want to be their best.”10
Is it?
Readers similarly went ape-shit over the retouch trim-up of Ugly Betty star America Ferrera on the October 2007 cover of Glamour. Despite the magazine’s denial of digitally altering the star, similar shots of the Latina beauty taken at the same time show her to be quite a bit curvier.
Perhaps Glamour would rather dub the show “Skinny Betty.”
Despite what we could only imagine were hundreds of disappointed and angry letters to the editor afterward, Glamour denied they had slimmed the zaftig actress. Maria Guerra of Glamour’s reader services responded to several blogger’s complaints saying, “Let me assure you, we did not digitally slim her. As she mentions in the interview, she wears a size 6/8 on the bottom, a 10 on the top. You are seeing her as she actually appears.”11
GLOSSY FACT
When the July 2007 issue of Redbook hit stands with a drastically retouched photo of Faith Hill on the cover, popular feminist website Jezebel circulated the original untouched photo of Faith, sending readers into a tizzy over the airbrushed ruse. Former Redbook top dog Stacy Morrison told the Today Show, “In the end, they’re not really photographs. They’re images.”12
Worse was when Oprah Winfrey was asked to appear on the October 1998 cover of Vogue. Winfrey spent months whittling herself to Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour’s specifications so she would look suitable in the Steven Meisel-photographed cover. “If you want to be on the cover of Vogue, and Anna Wintour says you have to be down to 150 pounds, that’s what you gotta do,” Winfrey told the BBC. “I didn’t think for one moment, ‘Now I am going to be a Vogue model’ nor even did I think I could hold that weight,” she confessed.13
Oprah looked incredible on the Vogue cover, whether it was due to a digital diet or the real thing, no one would say. However, the idea that one of the richest women in the world who made a name for herself empowering other women had diminished herself, both literally and figuratively, simply to appear as a cover girl flew in the face of her feminist ideals, and it contradicted her messages about the power and importance of a woman’s self-worth, which she’d been preaching about for over a decade.
Many women know, even accept, that chick slicks perpetuate half-truths and quarter-baked cover lines, and retouch images. And why not? In a world where fudging the truth has become epidemic, where reality TV stars become overnight celebrities, and the Real Housewives is one of the most successful television franchise of the decade, it seems just another way the media blurs the fine line between real life and a magazine’s airbrushed ideal. Not to mention it upholds a standard to which most of us can’t live up to—and don’t want to.
Sure, in the media glare of following catty housewives 24/7, making paparazzi-bait out of The Bachelor and Bachelorette couples, and creating celebrities out of the Kardashian sisters, magazine retouching may not be the worst offense the media commits, but it’s up there spiking our blood pressure, insulting our intelligence, and forever disappointing us, if not worse.
Ironically, in the March 2012 issue of Glamour, which seems always in the center of the airbrush argument, the magazine took a stand against the practice, asking readers how much is too much. They conducted an independent survey of 1,000 readers, asking them what they thought were “acceptable” elements to photoshop out of images that appeared in magazines. Seventy-seven percent said it was fine to remove blemishes from photos, but only 22 percent were okay with making women appear even five pounds slimmer!14 Glamour’s big confession was that yes, they airbrush—lightening backgrounds and erasing visible nipples beneath shirts, important work for sure—but they vow in the future to stop the excessive digital manipulation and to tell photographers with whom they work that women’s bodies are not to be altered. We can only watch their glossy pages to see if they live up to their “No Airbrush” promises.
Obviously, there’s a fantasy factor at play here. If we wanted untouched, unvarnished back flab and sagging breasts, we could just snatch a look in the mirror, or at the very least at our friends and family. The truth is, models and celebrities are packaged like a product by editors, artists, graphic designers, photographers, and writers whose job is to pamper and promote what they’re selling, whether that’s $100-an-ounce face cream, Manolo Blahnick shoes, or a celebrity’s latest movie. It seems editors actually think readers want their cover girls to live up to these impossible standards. Thus, when sales of women’s magazines are up, editors assume they are correct in gauging their reader’s wants and needs. And when magazine sales go down, as they have been over the past few years, with magazine revenue plummeting from 3.0 to 10.6 percent across the board, editors can blame the recession on lack of sales.15
Insider Input
“The images that are being projected to us aren’t even real. They are airbrushed manipulations that will keep us chasing the image forever, wondering why we can’t measure up. It is so important for us to know the truth, but we can’t expect those who most profit from the fabrications to tell us the truth. Because when we are empowered with the truth, we can make different choices. We can vote with our dollars. We can vote with our time . . . Here is the most essential headline women need to read: Nothing is wrong with you. There is no imperfect. You are exactly what this world needs, just as you are.”16
—Rosie Molinary, author of Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance
Apparently, the industry doesn’t get that readers may be forsaking the glossies not simply because they have less available cash to spend at the newsstand, but because they have less tolerance for perpetuating this unattainable beauty myth.
In fact, some magazines skew so far in favor of the beauty ideal that they often select only the most attractive people for the rest of the magazine, too. Even stories of real women who’ve had the heart attack at twenty-eight, left their corporate gig and opened a chocolate shop, or lost eighty pounds and ran a marathon aren’t captured on the page unless they’re sufficiently attractive—or can be retouched accordingly.
Jennifer Romolini, the editor-in-chief of Yahoo! Shine, a U.S. women’s lifestyle site, reported that a 2009 issue of French Elle showcased several European celebrities without makeup, and said, “American magazine editors, I plead to you: It’s time to step up your game. American readers would like to see some real, healthy women who actually look like themselves. We know you slim down their thighs and noses and you lighten their skin. We’re tired of fembots. We can handle the truth.”17
But can we really? Apparently not. Or else why do they keep it up? Why when the letters of praise pour in on features like Jaime Lee Curtis baring it all in MORE, or Aisha’s digital transformation in Glamour, do they ignore reader’s wishes and provide less of those realistic beauty ideals? Oh sure, once in a while they throw in a Jamie or an Aisha who remind us that the models and the actresses within the pages spent six hours in a photo shoot where they were styled, hairdressed, and made faultless, and what wasn’t ideal—a tiny zit on their chin, a bit of sag of the breast, a strip of flab along the back of the arm—was wiped away effortlessly by a graphic editor with a computerized retouching program. But not on a monthly basis. And even though we’re occasionally tossed a bone, the magazines don’t account for the relentless assault of beautiful retouched women who still exist on every other page in that same issue—whether the images accompany advertisements or editorial content.
GLOSSY FACT
According to a 2006 survey by the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty Global, 90 percent of women aged fifteen to sixty-four want to change at least one aspect of their appearance, most of all their body weight.18
Most serious news organizations have policies against photo manipulation, but not the women’s glossies. Here, retouching and slimming models, correcting impurities, and whittling away imperfections are actually the norm. Some claim it’s art. Among celeb stylists and publicists, it’s more like standard operating procedure.
Yet the real problem with airbrushing is that the standard of beauty is further and further removed from what the average American women’s magazine reader can attain. Models weigh about 23 percent less than the average woman, according to a 2004 SizeUSA study.19 When a celeb or actress is further whittled away by a computer software program, her skin radiantly aglow, her teeth and eyes an unnatural shade of alabaster, the perfect cleavage shadows emanating from her breasts, it may inspire fantasy but it sure doesn’t provide readers with any sense of self-significance. After all, if everyone in these pages is so perfect, where does that leave the rest of us?
Maybe we’ve come too far to turn back.
GLOSSY FACT
In April 2012, fourteen-year-old Julia Bluhm drew up a petition through change.org asking Seventeen magazine to print one unaltered (nonairbrushed) photo of a girl in each issue. After protesters perched outside Seventeen’s headquarters in New York City, Editor-in-Chief Ann Shoket invited Bluhm to meet with her. At the time, Shoket claimed the magazine celebrated teen girls for their authentic selves and portrayed real images. Yet by the July 2012 issue, Shocket backpedaled, saying many readers had contacted her with concerned messages about the airbrushed images of teen girls on their pages. As a result, Seventeen published the Body Peace Treaty reminding girls not to focus so much on how their body looks but by what it can do, vowing they never alter the way the girls in their pages really look. Way to go, Julia Bluhm! We can make a difference.
“Brides are airbrushing the red out of their eyes and getting rid of blemishes in their own wedding photos these days, so the technology’s here to stay, but the bottom line is that readers should not be misled,” said Cindi Leive, former president of the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) and the editor-in-chief of Glamour, in a 2008 Daily Beast article.20
That may be the case, but it shouldn’t apply when it comes to the lady magazines; even Glamour, the magazine that Leive knows best, has fallen under such scrutiny on occasion, before their newfound philosophy on retouching. And yet it appears our favorite celebs are regularly transformed into a Stepford image.
Insider Input
“When Jamie Lee Curtis did her ‘real woman’ photo shoot for MORE magazine in 2002, I thought it might spur more celebrities to come forward and reveal their true selves. But the only true selves we see of celebrities are the unflattering images of pudgy people with cellulite and no makeup on the cover of tabloid magazines. And these photos are meant to portray the celebrities at their very worst. They’re not a realistic image, just as the airbrushed and retouched images aren’t realistic in the way they extend women’s necks and legs, erase every single wrinkle and blemish, and make them unrealistically thin. I’m not opposed to helping someone look better and presenting them at their best. As a magazine writer, I totally get that. I want the celebrities I interview to look their best through my words. But there has to be something between the tabloid cellulite photos and the heavily retouched photos. It sets women—and especially young girls—up for a lifetime of trying to measure up, when the person they’re trying to measure up to isn’t even real.”
—Jane Boursaw, syndicated columnist and magazine writer
In a daring anti-airbrushing video spot by the soap manufacturer Dove, titled “Dove’s Evolution of a Model,” an ordinary brown-haired woman of average looks is shown being transformed at lightning speed by makeup, hair, and clothes for a mega-billboard cover shot. After the primping is complete, the retouching program begins and the woman who has already gone from ordinary to glam-gorgeous is then retouched via computer brushstroke. Her neck is giraffe elongated, her skin is wiped flawless, her lips are plumped, and her brows lifted—none of it even necessary for the woman, who looks to be in her early twenties. Flash to her billboard photo and the caption, “No wonder our perception of beauty is flawed.”21
Indeed.
While Dove may appear to be a leader in this anti-airbrush movement with their remarkable Campaign for Real Beauty, even they are not above reproach. In a 2008 New Yorker story on premier fashion-photo retoucher Pascal Dangin, the reporter asks him about the Dove ad campaign that shows off “real women” in their undergarments. The photo whisperer, as Dangin’s been referred to, says he worked that gig. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” Dangin asked, implying that it must have been a shit-ton of work getting these cellulite-ridden buxom babes ready for prime time. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”22
In a joint reply, Dove, its parent company Unilever, and campaign photographer Annie Leibovitz, denied substantially altering the “real women” images. Dangin retracted his earlier statements, claiming they were taken out of context. What’s more, Dangin further clarified that he only worked on the 2007 Dove Pro Age campaign, not the original Dove Campaign For Real Beauty ads, in which the New Yorker article conjured the images. On the Dove project he worked, Dangin says he performed only minor retouching, such as color correction and dust removal, although that’s certainly not the impression we get from his original direct quote.
Regardless, the Dove beauties rocked those photos. But the need for an expert retoucher like Dangin on a project in which all parties claim the goal was not to have a megapixel of retouching done seems like a whole lot of overkill, no? Why else would they employ the top fashion retoucher in the biz for the photos of the Dove women if any graphic artist on staff could have digitally removed some dust specs?
GLOSSY FACT
According to a 2011 U.K. study of 2,000 women, the first thing they notice about other women is how fat they are.23
As for Dangin, he’s unabashedly forthcoming in the New Yorker piece, acknowledging retouching is a practice clandestinely performed in the dark recesses of a basement workshop. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm,’” he says, though his very occupation seems to be up for moral, ethical, and philosophical debate.
In March 2008, just months before the New Yorker article was published, Dangin tells the reporter he tweaked 144 images for Vogue; 107 advertisements for companies like Estée Lauder, Gucci, and Dior; as well as thirty-six fashion pictures, and the Vogue cover of Drew Barrymore.24 He’s hired by the advertisers, and photographers such as Leibovitz, and is on retainer for about thirty celebrities. Again, we see the controversial nature of the retouch beast even among celebs that are retouched. While celebrities like Kate Winslet complain about botched retouch jobs (excessive slimming on a cover of the 2008 British GQ), other celebrities have professional artist and retoucher Dangin on retainer.
Yet those who sing Dangin’s praises realize he’s not just a graphic artist with a to-die-for retouch program; rather, he has an innate eye, along with the technical dexterity, to see and create possibilities within a photo that even the photographer couldn’t capture. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s above reproach when it comes to critics who detest a retouch of any type. He admits to spending the majority of his time and effort reshaping an ass, creating a cool dimple, minimizing chubby knees, or wiping away the ropy, veined feet of an over-forty actress in a pair of sexy sandals.25 And therein lies the fantasy.
GLOSSY FACT
Computer scientists at Dartmouth developed a rating system to discern how much airbrushing a photo has undergone. After analyzing nearly five hundred original and retouched images of models, they came up with a mathematical algorithim to analyze photos, using a rating system to show the amount of retouching the photo has undergone (from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most retouched). The researchers’ aim? To create a “universal health warning,” much like health warnings on a pack of cigarettes, that can be included in magazines. Spurred by their concerns over the negative impact these images have on men, women, and children, researcher Hany Farid said: “Such a rating may provide incentive for publishers and models to reduce some of the more extreme forms of digital retouching that are common today.”26 The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science in 2011.
Aren’t we perpetuating a standard of beauty to which no one can live up to with these images, ones for which the average reader looks at and must ask herself, is this real?
Even Dangin agrees, saying he’s only providing the service in response to the request. Supply equals demand. As already pointed out, even some editors-in-chief of women’s magazines say that photos aren’t even journalism, but instead they are creativity, fantasy, an image to inspire the reader.
Until and unless readers refuse to partake in such images by voicing their complaints or rejecting women’s glossies, we suspect Dangin won’t have to worry about job security any time soon.
It’s clear, despite articles on meditation and intuition, paying it forward, and giving back, women’s magazines have little to do with inner beauty, nor really have they ever.
Insider Input
“Retouching has always been a part of . . . glamorous and celebrity-oriented material. . . . People buy magazines like Vogue in order to look at a kind of perfection. They are sophisticated enough to know that what they are seeing is a construct. Nowadays people retouch their own snaps on the computer before posting them on Facebook.”27
—Alexandra Shulman, British Vogue editor