Esther Honig’s unedited headshot versus an edit by someone in Argentina.
Freelance journalist, Esther Honig, decided to put beauty standards to the test in her project “Before & After.” Honig sent her headshot to 40 different individuals in 25 different countries, simply asking that they “make [her] beautiful” through the use of Photoshop. The software that dominates such a large portion of visual media can alter the looks of a person quite drastically, and after viewing the photos from this project (which I have linked above), it is quite shocking to see just how much a person can be altered with technology.
If you aren’t aware already, let me be the first to break it to you: Almost everything (I say “thing” because many animals and food items are targeted) you see in the media is Photoshopped. There are instances where you might not believe a picture has been edited, but the media alters appearances in the most subtle of ways. It can be something as obvious as shaping a person’s body to appear thinner or more muscular, but it comes down to a point where models have their fingers elongated or their eyes rotated at 0.45 degree angle. Photoshop has allowed the media to create these impossible standards of “beauty,” but this is only the beginning.
Living in North America means that we are constantly exposed to Western ideals of beauty (and occasionally East-Asian cosmetics ads too), but have you stopped to think what someone in Sri Lanka or Serbia or Morocco finds beautiful? When you put beauty into a global perspective, it becomes so much harder to achieve what we have thought for so long is truly “beautiful.” Our perceptions are ever morphed by our surroundings and culture, and there is no one “real” standard of beauty.
Now, I’m going to share some of the more subtle photos from this project.
And here are some of the more dramatic edits.
That’s all I’m going to include because I really encourage you visit Esther Honig’s website and check out “Before and After“ for yourself where you can look through a side-by-side comparison slide show. (All photos retrieved from here and here.)
It’s interesting how in some pictures the stray hairs on the left were taken out and in some they were left be, same goes with the large chunk of hair sticking out of Honig’s bun. There were some subtle adjustments to mask her dark circles and fix her eyebrow shape whereas others took the time to change her eye color, give her new hair, and a whole new facial structure altogether. When you see how much difference Photoshop can make to a person, it’s hard to idolize the looks of celebrities in magazines or even on Google. You never know when a picture has been tampered with and the standards set by Photoshopped pictures are merely arbitrary.
I’m not going to say which ones I find “beautiful” or not because this project has really shown me that maybe there is no such thing. Your preferences are based off of where you grew up, your family’s ideals, who you hang out with, your teachers, strangers on the street, anyone or anything you come into contact with. The main lesson to take away from today is that beauty cannot be defined or measured. You will appear beautiful just the way you are to some and others will feel the need to change almost everything about you. At the end of the day, what’s important is that you are comfortable with yourself and accept every inch of the way you look.