Boards
Are her curves real or just an illusion? | ShutterStock.com
We’re not totally convinced that magazines are no longer selling skinny, but with Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, and Kate Upton popularizing their amazing curves, it isn’t surprising that magazines feel the need to add a bit more meat to some of their thinner models.
“These poor girls (models) have been forced to lose the very curves that the general public wants in order to find a woman attractive,” she said. “So when you do a sexier shoot with a skinnier girl, you have got to basically add volume via retouching where there is no volume in reality.”
No matter how you dice it, this sucks for models and women. Models are convinced that they have to be almost impossibly thin, but once they get there they’ve lost the curves that society associates with womanhood and female attractiveness. While it’s nice that curvy girls are being embraced, it’s important that we don’t alienate thinner, less curvy girls from their bodies. What’s also troublesome is that models who may be unhealthily underweight are being hired and enhanced, instead of confronted about a possible (life threatening) health issue.
The article points out, “Jane Druker, the editor of Healthy magazine in England, admitted that the cover girl arrived at the shoot looking ‘really thin and unwell.’ But rather than being sent home and another model hired, the publication instead chose to retouch the model to look larger, in keeping with the publication’s dedication to ‘healthy’ faces and figures.”
The root of the problem isn’t that one body type is more attractive than another, it’s that we see women’s bodies as something to be objectified and sold. The idea that “sexy curves sell” or “skinny doesn’t sell” is a conversation we would never have about men. No one ever asked, “Are man boobs in this season?”
Body types are just body types, they shouldn’t be a trend. The fact that they are perceived as something that should be changed based upon their cultural popularity just illustrates how much we try to oppress women by controlling their bodies through different techniques.
If you look at how women are portrayed in the media the conversation is always about their weight or how they dress, if you look to politics the conversation is always about the right to birth control, abortions, and even worse, what constitutes “legitimate rape” (and the fact that women even get raped, never mind that they get blamed for it too, is just too much to go into). If you look to sports the conversation is about how female athletes appear masculine or have “bad hair” and if you look to women in the workplace the question is always, how can she be in charge when she has crazy girl-hormones that will make her emotional?
Any critique about a woman, her intelligence, her ability, her talents, her rights, will come down to her body in some way, shape, or form. Women are judged by their appearance first and anything else second. The fashion industry just uses this idea to make lots and lots of money. Don’t turn your body into a trend. There will be a million new trends in your lifetime, but you only get one body.
How do you feel about thinner models being photoshopped to look fuller? Let us know in the comments!
This is for sure not ok! The way you look shouldn’t be altered at all, especially if a girl works very hard to be skinny, then gets photoshopped to look larger, that is destroying the model’s confidence.
As if I wasn’t alredy insecure about being skinny enough!
sure, photoshopping ruins some girls’ self confidence, but it’s what sells. There are people who just don’t want to see average girls on their magazine covers. There are people who see beauty in every person, but right now, in this age, society says beauty is big boobs, tinys waists, curvy butts and pretty faces. I think photoshopping is important because it sells magazines and it’s what many people want to see. I understand it makes some girls feel bad and feel beauty is unattainable, but the what photoshopping does is what people want to buy.
I am currently taking a PhotoShop/Image Editing class. The program is important when it comes down to removing a blemish or changing eyeshadow color, but when it is abused to make women look like 7 foot tall bean poles, that is just wrong. Every girl should be able to embrace her body size. Seeing images like the ones that are so wrongly enhanced has caused girls to develop eating disorders and manic depression. And I think that is wrong. We do want to see beauty, but we want to see realistic beauty.
Curvy doesn’t equal fat. Just because u gain weight it doesn’t mean u will have more curves. I’m a size two and I look more curvy than my bigger friends. Im like a c-cup and my friends who r bigger by hundreds of pounds r barely an a cup.
yay, someone else who agrees, if you’re curvy, that dose’nt make you fat. Curvey used to mean you had curves, but now everyone is using it as a nice way to say fat. Fat means your fat, curvey means you have curves
Great now skinny girls will be insecure… I think the memo was to STOP photoshopping so everyones comfortable in their own bodies.
They shouldn’t be photoshopping anyone to have more or less weight. I can understand if they want to take out a scratch or a zit, since that’s pretty minor, but they’re screwing with the models here, and are probably going to give them health problems for the rest of their lives. But stuff like this is why I like to shop at a store near me that doesn’t use models, they instead allow customers to take photos of themselves wearing clothes from that store, and as long as the photo isn’t blurry or whatever, they’ll post it in the store so people can see what the clothes look like on a real person.
That’s pretty cool
thats sooo cool id like to know which store that is (: is it a large corp or privately owned?
It’s a little store called Something Else, and it’s privately owned.