Trends take a look at why we love to enhance our social media photos while suffering from the possibilities of digital “makeup”
“Improving” the external image began at the moment when the first person looked in the mirror. Bandaging feet, blackening teeth, staining lips with mercury, using powder with arsenic – eras have changed, as well as the concept of beauty, and people have come up with new ways to emphasize attractiveness. Nowadays, you will not surprise anyone with makeup, heels, self-tanning, compression underwear or a push-up bra. With the help of external means, people transmit their position, their inner world, mood or state to the outside.
However, when it comes to photographs, viewers are ready to look for traces of Photoshop in order to immediately expose the one who used it. What is the difference between bruises under the eyes, smeared with a make-up artist’s brush, and those erased by a smart neural network? And if you look more broadly, how does the use of retouching affect our attitude to our own appearance and the appearance of others?
Photoshop: Getting Started
Photography became the successor of painting, and therefore at the initial stage copied the method of creating an image: often the photographer added the necessary features in the picture and removed the excess. This was a normal practice, because the artists who painted portraits from nature also catered to their models in many ways. Reducing the nose, narrowing the waist, smoothing out wrinkles – the requests of noble people practically did not leave us a chance to find out what these people actually looked like centuries ago. Just as in photography, intervention did not always improve the result.
In photo studios, which began to open in many cities with the beginning of the mass production of cameras, along with photographers, there were also retouchers on the staff. The photography theorist and artist Franz Fiedler wrote: “Those photo studios that most diligently resorted to retouching were preferred. Wrinkles on the faces were smeared; freckled faces were entirely “cleansed” by retouching; grandmothers turned into young girls; the characteristic features of a person were completely erased. An empty, flat mask was regarded as a successful portrait. Bad taste knew no bounds, and its trade flourished.
It seems that the problem that Fiedler wrote about 150 years ago has not lost its relevance even now.
Photo retouching has always existed as a necessary process of preparing an image for printing. It was and remains a production necessity, without which publication is impossible. With the help of retouching, for example, they not only smoothed the faces of the leaders of the party, but also removed people who were objectionable at one time or another from the pictures. However, if earlier, before the technological leap in the development of information communications, not everyone knew about editing pictures, then with the development of the Internet, everyone got the opportunity to “become the best version of themselves”.
Photoshop 1990 was released in 1.0. At first, she served the needs of the printing industry. In 1993, the program came to Windows, and Photoshop went into circulation, giving users previously unimaginable options. Over the 30 years of its existence, the program has radically changed our perception of the human body, because most of the photographs that we see now are retouched. The path to self-love has become more difficult. “Many mood and even mental disorders are based on the difference between the images of the real self and the ideal self. The real self is how a person sees himself. The ideal self is what he would like to be. The greater the gap between these two images, the greater the dissatisfaction with oneself, ”commented Daria Averkova, a medical psychologist, a specialist at the CBT Clinic, on the problem.
Like from the cover
After the invention of Photoshop, aggressive photo retouching began to gain momentum. The trend was first picked up by glossy magazines, which began to edit the already perfect bodies of models, creating a new standard of beauty. Reality began to transform, the human eye got used to the canonical 90-60-90.
The first scandal related to the falsification of glossy images broke out in 2003. Titanic star Kate Winslet has publicly accused GQ of retouching her cover photo. The actress, who actively promotes natural beauty, has incredibly narrowed her hips and lengthened her legs so that she no longer looks like herself. Timid statements “for” naturalness were made by other publications. For example, in 2009, the French Elle placed raw photographs of actresses Monica Bellucci and Eva Herzigova on the cover, which, moreover, were not wearing makeup. However, the courage to abandon the ideal picture was not enough for all the media. In the professional environment of retouchers, even their own statistics of the most frequently edited body parts appeared: they were the eyes and chest.
Now “clumsy photoshop” is considered bad form in gloss. Many advertising campaigns are built not on impeccability, but on the flaws of the human body. So far, such promotional methods cause heated debate among readers, but there are already positive changes towards naturalness, which is becoming a trend. Including at the legislative level – in 2017, the French media were obliged to mark “retouched” on pictures using Photoshop.
Retouching on the palm
Soon, photo retouching, which was not even dreamed of by professionals in the 2011s, became available to every smartphone owner. Snapchat was launched in 2013, FaceTune in 2016, and FaceTune2 in 2016. Their counterparts flooded the App Store and Google Play. In XNUMX, Stories appeared on the Instagram platform (owned by Meta – recognized as extremist and banned in our country), and three years later the developers added the ability to apply filters and masks to the image. These events marked the beginning of a new era of photo and video retouching in one click.
All this aggravated the trend of unification of human appearance, the beginning of which is considered to be the 1950s – the time of the birth of glossy journalism. Thanks to the Internet, the signs of beauty have become even more globalized. According to beauty historian Rachel Weingarten, before the representatives of different ethnic groups dreamed of not the same thing: Asians aspired to snow-white skin, Africans and Latinos were proud of lush hips, and Europeans considered it good luck to have big eyes. Now the image of an ideal woman has become so generalized that stereotyped ideas about appearance have been incorporated into application settings. Thick eyebrows, full lips, a cat-like look, high cheekbones, a small nose, sculpting makeup with arrows – for all their variety of applications, filters and masks are aimed at one thing – creating a single cyborg image.
The desire for such an ideal becomes a catalyst for many mental and physical problems. “It would seem that the use of filters and masks should only play into our hands: you retouched yourself, and now your digital personality on social networks is already much closer to your ideal self. There are fewer claims to yourself, less anxiety – it works! But the problem is that people have not only a virtual, but also a real life, ”says medical psychologist Daria Averkova.
Scientists note that Instagram from the most cheerful social network is gradually turning into a very toxic one, broadcasting an ideal life that does not really exist. For many, the app feed no longer looks like a cute photo album, but an aggressive demonstration of achievements, including in self-presentation. In addition, social networks have increased the tendency to view their appearance as a potential source of profit, which further aggravates the situation: it turns out that if a person cannot look perfect, he is allegedly missing out on money and opportunities.
Despite the fact that social networks negatively affect the mental health of a considerable number of people, there are many supporters of intentionally “improving” oneself with the help of filters. Masks and editing apps are an alternative to plastic surgery and cosmetology, without which it is impossible to achieve Instagram Face, like the star of this social network Kim Kardashian or top model Bella Hadid. That is why the Internet was so stirred up by the news that Instagram is going to remove masks that distort the proportions of the face from use, and wants to mark all retouched photos in the feed with a special icon and even hide them.
Beauty filter by default
It is one thing when the decision to edit your selfie is made by the person himself, and quite another when it is done by a smartphone with the photo retouching function installed by default. In some devices, it cannot even be removed, only a little “mute”. Articles appeared in the media with the headline “Samsung thinks you are ugly”, to which the company replied that this was just a new option.
In Asia and South Korea, bringing the photo image to the ideal is really common. The smoothness of the skin, the size of the eyes, the plumpness of the lips, the curve of the waist – all this can be adjusted using the application’s sliders. Girls also resort to the services of plastic surgeons, who offer to make their appearance “less Asian”, close to the standards of European beauty. Compared to this, aggressive retouching is a kind of light version of pumping yourself. Attractiveness matters even when signing up for a dating app. The South Korean service Amanda “skips” the user only if his profile is approved by those who are already sitting in the application. In this context, the default retouching option is seen as more of a boon than an invasion of privacy.
The problem with filters, masks, and retouching apps may be that they make people equally beautiful by fitting individual human appearance to a uniform standard. The desire to please everyone leads to the loss of one’s own self, psychological problems and rejection of one’s appearance. Instagram Face is erected on the pedestal of beauty, excluding any discrepancies in the image. Despite the fact that in recent years the world has turned towards naturalness, this is still not a victory over toxic retouching, because “natural beauty”, which implies freshness and youth, also remains man-made, and “makeup without makeup” does not go out of fashion.