Make me beautiful. Just go easy on the postmortem lividity

zwiebel

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As part of a social experiment/exploration, journalist Priscilla Yuki Wilson sent out a photograph of herself to photoshoppers and retouchers with the request, 'Make me beautiful'.

Too often I think, even if photoshoppers do have an ideal of beauty, a lot of them seem to lack the skills to put that into their retouched pics. So normally I'd pass over a story like this. But....

Apart from the one from the USA that looks like someone misunderstood the request as, 'show me the worst example of photoshop you can', what's up with Algeria? Is there really an ideal of beauty in Algeria that calls for a person to be made transparent, sent up into the stars to look like a disembodied alien - and to have what is surely a touch of postmortem lividity added around the top of her chest there?

*the orginal, unretouched photo by Che Landon is on the left, of course.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/...-different-countries-photoshop_n_5775200.html

Priscilla's blog.
http://priscillaywilson.wix.com/priscillayukiwilson#!blank/c1de8
 

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I thought it was an interesting experiment. Beauty has an ethnic component.
 
I saw this when it was first released... I agree, some of them are universally beautiful, and some are narrowed down to culturally beautiful. Now, after typing that, I wonder if I am being narrow minded with my "universally / culturally" classification. I certainly don't mean to be :). And, I guess that's really the point of the experiment.
 
I think they all look slightly 'off'. And I'm never going to approve of transparency, though can't think why. Maybe because it reminds me of those airport body scanners where staff get to giggle, then pretend they don't?
 
As for this one......
 

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Photographer went back and found that girl when she was older. Anybody want to see?
 
Most of them really aren't that bad. Vietnam has a weird chin, though.

Meanwhile, Montenegro got way too much plastic surgery:

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Most of them really aren't that bad. Vietnam has a weird chin, though.

Meanwhile, Montenegro got way too much plastic surgery:

slide_366450_4173226_free.jpg

There's a really weird one where someone stretched her neck, too?
 
A lot seemed to change her eyes. I like dark brown eyes.
 
The ''Afghan girl'' actually looks pretty good considering her history (growing up during one of the Middle East's bloodiest wars in one of the world's most unstable countries) and the fact that she lives in the mountains now.
 
I watched the documentary on the Afghan girl, when they went back to try to find her. They only found her because the teacher remembered her, the school still had the same teacher, and luckily the teacher remembered her name and where she went from the school. She had married. They found her husband, who did not approve of the attention on his wife. He would not allow his wife to be filmed, in the end he allowed them to speak to her but she had to wear her birqua (birka). So we never got to see her as an adult.
Thanks Zwiebel. I also think the old lady is marvelous. Got no idea of her age, but the fact that she reached old age is marvelous.
 

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