My statement

Children all around the world see models and celebrities who they look up to on ads, billboards, magazine covers, etc.   The image they see has usually been photoshopped or altered in one way or another, which gives people a false body to compare themselves to.  This creates a problem in many cultures because people, women especially, try to look just like the models they see and they don’t realize it’s an unrealistic body type. 

This really affects the self-esteem of many people because they want their body to look just like the one on a magazine cover, which doesn’t exist.  It doesn’t help that almost all models have a very unique body type.  They are taller than the average woman, have a naturally skinny figure, and are usually thinner than they should be regardless.  This unrealistic view of men and women alters how people think the average person should look, which means our opinions of what beauty looks like is false and distorted.

~Stephanie Hagin

new york times

Below are excerpts from a New York Times article by Eric Wilson. To read the whole article visit there site.

  • 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.

  • "The big discussion in the fashion business has always been about should we retouch girls, should we create a portrait of a girl that is not achievable by a real girl."
    ~Phil Poynter

  • "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."

  • It was in 2003 that one of the most famous retouching controversies arose when Kate Winslet asserted that the British edition of GQ had excessively altered a photograph of her to make her look thin.