Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but photo-editing software has dramatically influenced the modern beholder’s ideals. The widespread use of Photoshop has managed to take our perspective of human beauty to insanely unrealistic standards. Photographers alter and manipulate images until they barely resemble the original photo. The Miss World Philippines pageant recently released portraits of their female contestants and sparked rage among viewers due to their not-so-subtle editing, according to The Huffington Post.
The headshots almost appear to be animated as a result of the editing they underwent. Facial features such as pores and freckles are blurred out, and the women are given bright, pale skin that rivals the perfection of a porcelain doll. Their eyes are whitened, lips pinkened and hair smoothed out to the max. The finalized images have an artificially soft look. While it’s clear that the portraits of the Miss World Philippines pageant were subjected to some pretty severe editing, we must take into consideration “cultural preferences,” according to http://www.petapixel.com.
Here in the United States, the use of Photoshop in advertisements and photo-shoots has been a controversial topic for a while now. Even though it is common practice among most advertising campaigns, severely changing the way a model looks is often commonly looked down on by members of our society. Household brands such as Dove and Arie propagated the negative reputation of Photoshop with their positive body-image campaigns, “Real Beauty,” and “The Real You is Sexy.” So, when I saw the pictures of the Miss World Philippines pageant contestants I was shocked by how drastically edited they look, and how plastic and fake the women in them appear.
The publishing of the photos to “Yahoo Philippines” caused an immediate reaction from viewers; many were furious about the overly edited pictures, and made their anger clear by commenting on the post. Multiple viewers even went as far as to type things like “all these girls look like they’ve been sandblasted smooth. They almost have no faces left,” and “the Photoshop artist made them look sooOOoOoo unrealistic,” according to http://www.petapixel.com. While many people have strongly voiced their dislike for the photos, it is possible that it is simply a cultural preference and take on beauty.
This past September, a woman named Priscilla Yuki Wilson experimented with different culture’s ideas of beauty. She sent her own portrait to be edited by Photoshoppers in 18 different countries, and asked them to make her look beautiful. When the retouches were complete, Wilson found that “many of the retouched photos she received were also heavily softened and altered in color,” according to petapixel.com. This description matches up with the edited portraits of the pageant contestants in the Philippines.
Different cultures have varying ideas of what beauty is. While criticizing the high amount of editing done to the pageant portraits, it is important to consider that the editor may have simply been creating the image he believed his culture would appreciate the most.
Emily Silverman can be reached at emily.silverman@spartans.ut.edu