Unattainable Beauty

Teddi sent me a rather fascinating article about unattainable standards of Hollywood and fashion beauty that is well worth a read. It’s about the photographic retouching scandals (some of the worst of them) that have been perpetrated by various magazines in the past couple of years. It’s well worth a read, and here is the link for your viewing pleasure.

http://www.newsweek.com/feature/2010/unattainable-beauty.html

Men are made bigger, women smaller, and any hints of the approach of middle age are air brushed away. It should make us feel a bit better, I think, that even the perfect are nowhere near perfect anymore. No one is perfect enough.

People even do this on their own these days. If you go to You Tube and type in “photoshop makeover” you’ll find a number of fascinating tutorial videos that make fat people slim, young people old and ugly people beautiful.

I’m not totally innocent of this either, I once uploaded a picture of myself in a bathing suit into Photoshop and tried to make myself slim. Unfortunately, I’m so bad with Photoshop that all I succeeded in doing was to distort myself into a shape not recognizable as human. Which in it’s own way was sort of fun but not the goal I was looking for.

It wasn’t just an exercise in self flagellation, I wanted a picture of ‘future-me’ for inspiration. Something I could look at and go – yeah babe, I’m comin’ for ya. In that sense I don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing.

I’ve heard it said that society wants whatever is harder to obtain; so in times of famine the rounded, chubby woman was ideal because food was hard to come by and it wasn’t easy to be bootylicious. Now that unhealthy, fatty food is so much cheaper and easier to get than healthy choices it’s slimness that we prize.

Looking at the pictures in this photo editorial though it’s easy to see that we’ve gone way too far. I think my favorite is Kate Winslet’s outrage over GQ erasing the curves of her stomach. One of the things I love about Kate is her comfort with her own natural, stunning, curvaceous beauty. Good to see that she loves that too.