Beauty United?

While working this morning I took a small break to wander around the internets and stumbled upon an article which seemed to potentially be very cool. Then I started reading...and, well, I was confused and somewhat amazed. You can read the article here.

"How Euro-Centric

Beauty Ideals

Are Around  The World"

Turns out a woman, Esther Honig, decided to send of an untouched headshot of herself to retouchers and designers around the world with the instructions of retouching it to "make me look beautiful". The base image is below. Turns out most people were confused by this. So she clarified by stating that she wanted them to make her look like one of the women in their country's fashion magazines and then sat back and waited for the stunning results. I'm just not sure the results were stunning.

What I saw, at least what was released, was a lot of bad retouching. My guess is that this kind of thing was probably hard to convince some really top retouchers in the field to jump on the band wagon. So there were a lot of aspects of the retouching that were mediocre at best. Applied makeup that just pulled the eye away from viewing the picture. I guess I'm saying the quality of the retouch distracted from the point of the experiment. One thing did stick out though and it is pointed out. It becomes clear how "euro-centric beauty ideals are around the world", and that's pretty interesting.

Italy

Vietnam

Now this is not to say that there weren't some very good retouching in some of the images. There were a couple that I thought were nice, but they were very similar...and there really were only a two or three. That just goes to prove the above quote. Which brings me to an interesting point, and perhaps this really was the point of the experiment, are our worldwide views of beauty coming unified?

Ukraine

I suppose because we will live in a world that is continually "plugged in", that this possibility isn't so far fetched. We share vast amounts information, points of view, creations, and cat videos with the world every day. Just about anything you'd want to know, whether it's 100% true or not, is just a simple web search away. So naturally it would seem that we would begin to mingle our visions of beauty and it only makes sense that the lines that once clearly defined what we see as "beautiful" in the USA  and "beautiful" in India slowly become blurred. That's an interesting thought.

Most of the retouched images from Esther Honig's experiment were not that great. As a friend of mine put it, "The only thing I got from this was that people around the world suck ass at Photoshop". This is true. Well put. The two images from the USA are particularly bad, but the ideal there is clear, I think.

USA

But it's interesting how the basic view is pretty much the same. I do think that it would have been interesting to see what the results would have been if the image was a full body shot as opposed to just a headshot.

That's just my two cents.