Body image issues.
As women, we’ve faced this issue since day one, being constantly bombarded by edited magazine images, TV commercials, and movies. Luckily, for the most part, today’s society has worked to expose the photo editing of professional pictures and we’ve adopted an attitude to condemn this behavior….
Same model, different amounts of photoshop
…. But what happens when even after we’ve exposed the professional photos, the same filters, editing, and special effects have begun to creep up in our social media?
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become sources of crippling body image, especially amongst adolescent girls. As the BBC put it, on these sites, “You put forward your best self, and that can be a bit dangerous, because you naturally compare yourself to others.”
Nowadays, it seems like the idea of the “untouched picture” has died. And why wouldn’t I want to touch up my photo when the options to make my skin tanner, my teeth whiter, my hair shinier are right at my finger tips with the right Instagram filter?
It doesn’t seem too harmful to perfect a photo, especially, excuse the generalization, when everyone is doing it. According to one site though, “The more and more we use this editing, the higher and higher the bar goes. They’re creating things that are physically impossible.”
It is impossible to achieve the kind of real-life beauty provided by photo editing, but it doesn’t seem like it because so much of our lives revolve around social media. It’s our window into our peers’ lives and wow, do their lives look good in Valencia.
A hugely unforeseen problem with this editing craze is we notice flaws we never really considered as flaws before. My senior year of high school, I, like so many of my classmates, had professional senior pictures taken. The day of the photo shoot rolled around and I honestly felt like a model. I had my hair and make up primmed and ready for the camera, a whole montage of outfits I knew I looked good in and I was ready to live my fantasy as a cover girl.
It wasn’t until after the shoot, when I came back a few weeks later to see the final results of the photos that I saw the downside to my modeling dream. The pictures weren’t of me… it was a better, prettier version of me. I had asked for the photos to be minimally touched up, but what I got was to the extreme.
The editors had lengthened my legs, tanned my skin, flattened my stomach, and edited out a scar from surgery on my chest. I thought I had looked great going into the shoot, but these pictures just taunted me because it made me feel like what I looked like now wasn’t good enough.
I wish I could say I changed my ways after that incident and abstained from photo editing, but easier said than done. But I have viewed Instagram with a grain of salt now. I know what I see on even my friends’ accounts aren’t accurate depictions of who they are. These people’s beauty in their photos isn’t real and I shouldn’t strive to look like that when it doesn’t even exist.
There’s a difference between what you see in person and what people want you to see through their camera lenses. In the end, beauty is not about looking perfect, or what you see in the photo, it is how you feel about yourself. So take some advice from the goddess Audrey Hepburn, and remember that the greatest beauty is found in your own radiating happiness and that is a light that can’t be edited.
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