Teacup

In the midst of fashion industry, you will never see a high end brand without beautiful campaigns. Thousands of dollars are spent every year on ad campaigns and photoshoots to make sure we have stunning shots to represent our brands. You just have to flick through any of the glossy magazine to see the number of beautiful women (and men) spread across the pages. It is a well known fact that glossies themselves spend tremendous amount of time and money altering images from the cover to the back of the mag to ensure that no detail is left imperfect. But, even though we are aware of this fact, I don’t think we, as consumers, grasp the degree to which this is taken to affect. In fact, 99% of what we see in magazines is somehow retouched or altered and many of us do not realise this.

The world is taking a stand against this however as the French government contemplates enforcing laws to require photoshopped images in magazines to be stamped with a ‘health warning’ claiming:

“Photograph retouched to modify the physical appearance of a person.”

The British government is going one step further and pushing to ban photoshopping completely on ads aimed at people under 16 years of age after pictures of 59 year old Twiggy appeared an Olay ad almost airbrushed to death.

One of the more recent culprits that we publicly shamed is Ralph Lauren with their model Filippa Hamilton whom they later fired for being ‘too fat’.

The photo was sent to Photoshop Disasters by the source and widely spread within days. One internet blogger form Boing Boing wrote: “Dude, her head’s bigger than her pelvis”.

If the new laws were put in place, you have to wonder though whether they will actually work. Isn’t it the same idea as putting ’smoking kills’ warnings on cigarette boxes? It’s shocking the first time we see it, but after a while we slowly just skim over it. Not knowing how much alteration has been done to the image also makes it easier to not really think about it all that much.

Nevertheless, I think that creating unrealistic standards of beauty is unfair especially to kids growing up idealising what they see in TV and magazines and have little idea about whether what they see is close to reality or not. Although simply putting a fineprint warning may not be perfect, it does create some sort of awareness and I think it is a good start.