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BEAUTY BLABBER | PHOTOSHOP

By Huda Heidi Kattan

Of course we all KNOW beauty, fashion and celebrity photos are all photoshopped, but just how real are they? I was pretty shocked when I heard how much photoshop goes into a photo, we all know they cinch waists, buff out wrinkles and lighten skin, but what about adding makeup, actually buffing out protruding bones and removing freckles so well that the person looks unrecognizable? I was really kind of in awe when I read this interview from Buzzfeed with an anonymous photoshopper from the industry that has worked on some crazy huge campaigns! This is something every woman must read! Kind of reminds me of the Dove Campaign Evolution of a Photo!
 

On smoothing out bones

“I have smoothed boniness before — like when models have bones sticking out of their chest, they want that subdued. That’s somewhat common.”
 

On smoothing out skin

“The skin is another story: we completely remove veins and freckles and moles and bags under the eyes all the time. We often remove body hair, subdue wrinkles, whiten teeth, pop the eyes. We also smooth kneecaps and veins in the hands and things like that — anything that’s distracting that takes away from the product being featured. If you look at something and the model’s got dark kneecaps with dry skin, your eyes are going to go straight to the knees instead of whatever it is they’re modeling”
 

On Beauty Ads

“I do work on a lot of cosmetics images, too, and the mascara ads are just ridiculous. They wear false eyelashes, of course, in the photoshoot, and we completely draw the lashes in one by one so it’s just like a forest of eyelashes. That’s like the biggest lie of all — you can’t achieve that”
 

On Celebrities

Celebrities get retouched a lot more than models. Celebrities have their own photographers and those images get retouched before they even go out anywhere because celebrities don’t want those unretouched photos leaking to the public at any cost.
 

On Moving Body Parts

“But retouchers do things like cut out a head from one photo and put it on the body from another. I do that kind of stuff all the time. Let’s say they do a photoshoot with a model and the body comes out well, but she’s got a wonky look on her face. They might want to put this head on that body. Or they want to put an arm from one photo on the body of another — that’s common”
 

The Truth

“I wish everybody knew everything was retouched. I wish young girls wouldn’t look at things and say, wow, her skin is so perfect, there are no pores, no pimples, no freckles — I want my skin to be like that. It’s not possible. The skin retouching and smoothing is the most deceiving thing, but if we stopped doing that now, you’d flip through your magazine and say, oh my God, honey you need to put on some makeup. To stop doing it now would be so noticeable.”