With all of the focus lately on sublime issues like African famine, celebrity deaths and brinkmanship over the U.S. debt ceiling, perhaps this commentary on the ridiculous trend of airbrushing images of women will provide a welcome diversion.
A female friend sent me an airbrushed photo of herself a couple days ago and asked what I thought. She’s a beautiful woman. Yet she frequently remarks on aging lines and wrinkles, as well as her imperceptibly disjointed nose and thin upper lip, all of which she considers facial flaws.
In this photo, however, all of her purported flaws were gone. Therefore, I suppose she expected me to say that she looked, well, flawless.
In fact, all I could think to say was that she looked like a Madame Tussauds wax work. Everything was just a little too perfect.
This prompted a discussion on the proliferation of airbrushing of images in magazines and on the internet that make the notion of natural beauty seem quaint, or even anachronistic.
As it happened, I had read a report in the Guardian earlier that day on the heroic and instructive decision by Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to ban L’Oreal ads featuring actress Julia Roberts and “supermodel” Christy Turlington because they promoted “overly perfected and unrealistic images” of women.
My friend seemed heartened when I told her about this decision, but insisted that it would have no impact on women’s aspirations to look like the women in those misleading ads: sad, but probably true….
I am sensible enough to know, however, that it would take someone far more credentialed in sociology and psychology than I to disabuse even my own friend of such misguided aspirations.
Therefore, I sufficed to suggest that any woman who thinks an airbrushed photo will help her enhance her sex appeal is only setting herself up for disappointment, or worse.
That said, I will assert here that the deception inherent in airbrushing images is only a more high-tech form of the deception inherent in plastering one’s face with makeup. And nothing demonstrates this quite like magazine issues featuring celebrities “caught” without their masks, um, er, makeup.
For what it’s worth, I would be irretrievably turned off if the difference between the way a woman looks the first time we go to bed and the way she looks after washing her face the next morning were like night and day.
And don’t get me started on deceptive features like hair extensions and boob implants…. Yikes!
Thank God I’m no longer playing the dating game.
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