Photoshopped? ME?! You must be joking!

I am not a girl that is particularly bothered about what people think of me.  Don’t get me wrong, I like to look nice when I go places, but I don’t read fashion magazines and apart from my boyfriend, I couldn’t care less if people find me or what I’m wearing attractive.  This is not an attitude that I have always had.  My teen years were spend very much the same as most girls, looking at pictures of models and famous people in magazines and wondering why my genes failed me.  Annoyed at my dad for giving me his flat hair, or my Mum for passing on her button nose and generally believing that the world is full of beautiful people with flawless skin and svelte bodies, and I was just a reject that had to cope with what I had.

And then I learned about Photoshop.  This fantastic piece of software can turn even the most ordinary person into a Goddess with the right filter, color cloning and edit tool.  Suddenly, it all made sense to me.  Even though there are people out there that quite frankly are born stunning, even those naturally beautiful people do not look like girls on the covers of magazines.  There is a big difference in touching up a few things to make a photograph look slightly better, and altering an image beyond recognition.  When it is being taken to a level that you  wouldn’t be able to relate to a picture of yourself, like the women in the video below, then surely it has gone too far.

Photoshop itself is art, its a digital tool to manipulate pictures and create new images,and it is not a new notion.   Back in the day of oil portraits, painters were paid to make people look more masculine, or paler skinned (depending on the current trend).  And it is not this tool that I am having a pop at.  My sister said to me when we discussed it ‘Photoshop is the gun, its the ad agencies that fire it’  and she is right.  Building an image for the ‘normal’ people that by using this cream, or spraying that spray, you too can look like the Adonis on page 5 set everyone up for a giant fall, and makes all of us feel inadequate and reliant on products to be accepted and successful.

Watch the video and make your own mind up, but I for one am happy to be organically grown, and photographed in all my flawed beauty 🙂

**Video was sourced from http://www.digg.com and hosted by Youtube