The thoughts that were thunk and the goings on of my life.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Why Teenage Girls are Depressed

Today while I was surfing Blogdom I came across this.

Glenn Feron - The Art of Retouching


While I applaud Glenn on his abilities to make photos absolutely beautiful, it also makes me a bit sad. Even these women who are stunningly beautiful are not even close to that beautiful in their natural form. I've always heard, "Oh they just airbrush them in that magazine." But I never really understood what a difference it makes until today.

This photo in particular shows a huge deal of change. You can see that all lines, cellulite, and moles are removed. Contrast is enhanced. The faces are lifted. The breasts appear to be rounder. Tummies are tucked in a bit. Some of the other pictures even show complete change of garb.

What's saddest though is that these are the pictures that teeny bops will compare themselves to and then go bulimic trying to reproduce. They will never look like the women in these photos, because these people do not exist!

4 comments:

Magnu-tron said...

"The teenage girl is crying 'cause she don't look like a million dollars.
So help her if you can,
'case she don't seem to have the attention span"

I'm with you man. However, it goes too far in the other direction now, too. We're so about "accepting our bodies" that we excuse a lack of fitness and general health. I wish we would preach optimal fitness for our own body types. Clearly someone with the build of a shot putter is never going to have the build of someone who is naturally a twig. We should put the emphasis on beauty through fitness, not beauty only as an ectomorph.

I totally dig this nike ad campaign:
http://nikewomen.nike.com/nikewomen/us/index.jhtml?ref=www.nike.com#body

Anonymous said...

you'd be amazed how much photoshop can do. right? well, before photoshop there was makeup and before make up there was... oh wait, that was 4000 years ago.

women are always going to put themselves up against an ideal. it's just up to us to make sure that ideal is as healthy as possible.

Magnu-tron said...

I wonder if I could pay this guy to airbrush me. I think that would be funny.

Anonymous said...

Hey, "R", how about if you pay someone to hairbrush you? - Now that would be funny!!...R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-!!!