Quick note on something hilarious I read while perusing the gossip blogs that are my Internet equivalent of Real Fruit gummies:
On August 5th 2009, Marie wrote:
I don’t know if it’s because everyone has fake boobs, I’m starting to think that the real thing are the weird looking ones...
The end of that sentence is "or because she's a kid," which I did not post because it's in reference to the fact that the owner of said chest puppies is Vanessa Hudgens, a Disney star - and she was allegedly 17 when she took the pictures that were then leaked from her Blackberry. But for the purposes of this post, that's neither here nor there.
Rather, I wanted the opinion of a captive audience of (possibly more than) 3. I still firmly (ha!) believe that fake ones are the weird ones, but maybe I'm just strange. Do fake (and we'll include airbrushed and retouched/Photoshopped-beyond-reality in that folder) breasts look "normal" to you now, such that real ones seem sort of...off?
The reason why I think this is interesting is that as far as Photoshopping women (and men) to seem more attractive, my initial gut reactions to the photos are often a 50/50 split on whether I find them attractive or not. This is a great website with before and after versions of retouched photos of celebrities. I'm also coming from a position in which I know that most photographs are retouched, and I have a very healthy self-image. What I find interesting is where we would draw the line between "attractive" and "weird" when it comes to things that are supposedly more enticing than the real thing, and whether or not - or how often - the "better" version has replaced the mental image of the real thing in our minds.
Nah, just kidding. I just wanted to talk about boobs.
(shout-out to the brilliant folks over at Sociological Images for the website about photo editing).
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I'm not going to say that I find the after pictures unattractive, but only because the people in the pictures are attractive themselves. If I saw one of the unaltered photos in a magazine I would have the exact same response to it as seeing one of the altered photos. Although, I am often taken aback by skin so clear it sits on the lip of the uncanny valley.
ReplyDeleteOh but that post is about boobs. No, breast implants are strange, particularly on your average extremely skinny celebrity.
As someone who considers himself somewhat of an expert on boobs (in much the same way that a sportswriter can be an expert on sports without ever playing much football), I declare fake boobs to be definitively not attractive. I will say that on occasion the cleavage produced by a pair of fake boobs can be pleasant to behold, but if it's naked it's gotta be real and naked or else it looks like two grapefruits stuffed into sports socks. Which is yucky.
ReplyDeleteThat website is strange. At first, the photos look normal to me. And then I look at the non-gussied-up versions which in turn look a little corpsish. But after a moment or two they look normal to me because...well, they are. And then I look at the magazine version again and now that one looks creepy.
Man in Crank 2 a stripper gets shot through her fake boobs and silicon is shooting everywhere like lava out of a science fair volcano it is fucking disgusting
ReplyDeleteBreast implants are strange, mostly because they are incredibly obvious. If done poorly, they sit way far away from each other staring off in different directions like a slow child and if done well, they just look like when too many birds are sitting on one branch and the whole thing looks like its going down
after looking at the link to the retouching agency, i admit to being very unsettled. i knew before that photoshop is a powerful tool, but i wasn't aware to what extent it could create artefactual human beings. my real problem with this is the standard it sets. i know that that's an old line of argument. anorexia is exacerbated by unrealistic images of human bodies, right? well, now you don't just have to have unrealistic goals, but what are literal unrealistic--aka manufactured--bodies. plus, it's creepy to think the level of meretriciousness that we're surrounded by. time to get out the tinfoil.
ReplyDeletep.s. fake boobs suck. they look ridiculous and feel about as attractive to the touch as an unripened avocado. plus, stretching your tits like that makes the veins pop out hella grossly. what is the payoff?
Like a bag of sand.
ReplyDeleteI think that what I find the strangest about the photos on that site is not so much altering the shape of someone's body or face - obviously the "ideal" body is so far removed from reality that I frankly expect the degree of retouching that we saw there. Also, there are elements (Beyonce's perfectly flat stomach in the photo of her bent over cutting peppers) that could never exist, so clearly the photo has been retouched. What I find stranger is the skin. It wasn't until I first saw this site that it really hit me - the image of (especially female) skin that we are presented with, regardless of skin colour, is completely smooth and poreless.
ReplyDeleteI never really thought about just how much photo editing plays a role in selling the product. The models are no longer the ideal to attain - it's the person sitting in front of a computer who is dictating beauty. It's almost as though we've come full circle: from pre-photograph days of seeing what the artist chose to depict, to fashion and beauty photography that relied heavily on real people to be models of female beauty, back to an era in which it doesn't matter what the original product looks like because some wizard with a computer program can make you look however you want. There are some crazy videos on YouTube of the process.
There's a Canadian model named Linda Evangelista: one of the first "supermodels" and the woman who said that she "didn't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day," she's stunning. Having seen photos of her from the days before computer photo retouching was as easy as it is now, I can tell you that she has excellent bone structure and beautiful skin (or at least a very talented makeup artist).
Now she's in ads for anti-aging cream and things like that (because god forbid someone over 25 should dare to be in commercials for anything that doesn't have "anti-aging" or "anti-wrinkle" in the title), and she honestly looks like a cyborg. I don't believe she's actually in the commercials - it could be a CGI version of her for how fake it looks.
It makes me sad partly because I love old ladies and therefore love wrinkles and grey hair and all the things that make older women beautiful, but mainly because "imperfections" are what's interesting.
On a semi-related note, did anyone else notice how many of those pictures actually showed retouching to make the subject look larger instead of smaller (fattening arms, etc.)?