Photoshop: Changing the Idea of Beauty
By Ashley Pun, Claire Ricketts, and Emily Purkey
Photoshop has been around for a while, but many believe it is starting to be abused by advertisers. How is this issue affecting the way that people perceive beauty in our society?
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| A retouched photo of Julia Roberts, and actress in her 40's |
Whether you’ve had experience with photoshop or not, we all know that retouching and perfecting happens in ads. In fact, it can even happen in everyday photos that we see of our friends and family online. While it seems normal for society to alter images, what not everyone knows is the effect that photoshop is causing on our perception of beauty.
Almost everyone, both young and old, both guys and girls, want to look good. It’s a natural human characteristic to want to look good and healthy. In fact, it's a known fact that traits that define a person as healthy also define them as attractive, such as unwrinkled skin, a face free of blemishes, and nice, wide-awake looking eyes. So it’s when photoshop goes in and changes a face that things become a little dicey.
Mrs. G, a teacher at Stoller Middle School, has used her fair share of photoshop, but she still says this about it’s use: “[I’ve used photoshop] to get rid of pimples, bags, crop, brighten and color images.” Even so, she believes that photoshop in ads should be regulated and used in moderation. False advertising should not have to be used to sell a product. If something doesn’t work, advertising for it is pointless and a waste of time in the long run. You may make a bit of money at first, but then people will realize the product is a sham and they will continue on with life.
A concerned Stoller student brought up another idea. ”[Ads] should be about inner beauty only,” he says. Inner beauty really is the only type of beauty that matters in the real world. You can look as perfect as you like, but if you have a bad attitude, no one is going to want to give you a chance. And that works in reverse too. Just because someone isn’t a stereotypical model doesn’t mean they can’t be the friendliest person in the world and have a lot of success in their life. Personality plays a big role in the comprehension of determining if someone is truly beautiful.
Mr. Jerde, one of the vice principals at Stoller, also had similar ideas concerning photoshop. “It all depends on how much retouching you are doing. Used for specific purposes, it can be inappropriate, such as when you are changing or altering people’s bodies,” he says. This is just as important as retouching, because it still is altering a person’s image, even if it is in a different way. Adding tattoos is changing the way a person looks for sure, and putting someone’s face on another person’s body could change the way they want to be perceived into something else.
A great point was made by Mrs. Nader, a school counselor. “I think that the retouching of photos is fueled by society’s desire for a perfect image to come across. Ideally, photoshop would only be used to accentuate relative aspects of a photo.” She believes that society and business combined have made the population want to see a perfect person when they flip through a magazine or look up on a billboard. But if photoshop was only used to brighten, color, crop and enhance photos without changing the way people looked, it would be a useful and very appropriate tool for the media industry.
Another point by Mrs. Nader caused some thought-provoking reactions to happen. “Photoshop creates a skewed perception of beauty and promotes an unrealistic goal to young people.” This is, in our opinion, a very good point. Little kids are more impressionable, and with the media more and more accessible each day, young children are given impossible standards of beauty to live up to. It isn’t morally right for small girls to assume that they can only be ‘beautiful’ if they have flawless skin, sharp facial features and a thin frame when there are so many different types of beauty in the world.
Mrs. Shaenzer commented on the effects that photoshop has on body image and self esteem. “Photoshop is not ok in ads, especially in regard to girls. They think they are supposed to look perfect because of photoshop, but there’s no such thing as perfection.” Retouching of ads can affect how girls want to look, although the images they are seeing are false. Because body image is already such a big problem in girls who are still developing, photoshop just makes things worse. Seeing an ad that features someone who is photoshopped gives people ideas of what they want to look like. These ideas are based on lies, however, if the company claims that their product can make you look as good as the models.
Although most of the people we interviewed had very strong opinions on photoshopping in ads and magazines, when we asked them if photoshop should be used in moderation, to the extreme, or not at all, 100% of the people we interviewed said it can/should be used in moderation. We found this surprising because we expected them to be very opposed to the idea. We then asked them why it could be used in moderation. Most of them responded with the same general answer: “It can be fun, you can add captions to photos, change the colors, make silly photos, etc.” Cherie Pun, a retired teacher from Shelley Elementary in Utah said: “Photoshop can be used for fun purposes, but magazine and ad companies that use it for making someone look better or skinnier than they are should not abuse the use of photoshop.”
Our opinion on the matter is that photoshop can be extremely useful in certain instances, but it is very easy to abuse the functions that photoshop offer. For example, if a picture is too dark to clearly see what is going one, then brightening it makes complete sense. If the important part of the photo is out of focus, using photoshop to fix that makes sense too. Changing a photo from color to black and white to make it old fashioned can change the flavor of the picture and give it more meaning, and that’s ok too. But what is too much?
Well, too much could be taking all of the flaws off a person’s face. Too much could be completely fixing someone’s hair, or making makeup seem brighter than it really is in real life. When a person is altered so much that you can hardly recognize them, or can obviously tell that they are fake, then false advertising becomes a problem.
One of the main problems with false advertising is the effect that it can have on younger people, girls especially. There has been a major increase of eating disorders over the years, and many people believe that the harsh media is a part of it. When you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Think of the last time an overweight person was featured in an advertisement for a beauty product. With all these fake images of beauty flying around, people are bound to have second thoughts about how they look and how they should look.
Retouched ads have been a big topic in the media lately, maybe because it has changed so much in recent times. Many videos and ads have gone viral because of their negative retouching themes. For example, Make Up Forever, a makeup company, have been putting out their completely unretouched makeup ads, which look just as good as completely fake ads because they look so real. However, the model is naturally beautiful enough and wearing enough makeup that thinking you could look like that in real life is probably a long shot.
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| A before and after from the Dove evolution video |
Also, people forget that Adobe (the brand who created photoshop) is not at fault. Just because photoshop is the most liked photo editor among retouchers doesn’t mean that they are the only company being used for retouching of ads and even online photos of people in their everyday life. Just because Adobe is the most liked company does not mean that the media controversy of altered images was their idea.
So, no one really knows what’s in the future of beauty and media ads. Hopefully we can end up with realistic, effective ads that give people a true sense of what beauty is. Inner beauty is always more important than what’s on the outside: especially if the outside has to be faked just to sell a product. No one want to witness false advertising themselves, and that is just magnified by the fact that advertising can cause girls and guys to feel badly about the way that they look and to want to become the standard definition of “perfect.” We definitely hope for a more realistic approach to advertising in the future.
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