Picture Perfect

In May, Men's Fitness reportedly incited thickness in tennis star Andy Roddick by enlarging his already muscular arms to promote a story about biceps. Roddick himself mocked the photo on his personal blog; a spokesman for the magazine later told the New York Times, "I don't see what the big issue is here." Later, readers went crazy over the apparent slimming of "Ugly Betty" star America Ferrera on the cover of Glamour, despite the magazine's denials. (Irony alert: there's an entire episode of "Ugly Betty" devoted to putting "real"-looking models in magazines.) But most memorable, perhaps, were the shocking before-and-after pictures of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook, revealed last July by popular femme-gossip site Jezebel and circulated around the Internet en masse. Redbook editor in chief Stacy Morrison defended the changes, telling the "Today" show, "In the end, they're not really photographs. They're images."

Any photographer will tell you: airbrushing has been around for decades. The problem today, of course, is how easy technology has made it to perfect those images. Buy a digital camera and it comes with retouching elements. Anyone can learn how to use Photoshop to blend and tighten and thin—people do it for their MySpace photos all the time. As actress and bikini model Elizabeth Hurley told a British newspaper recently, she so loves being airbrushed to look "thinner" and "younger" that she's taken to Photoshopping her own holiday photos. "Brides are airbrushing the red out of their eyes and getting rid of blemishes in their own wedding photos these days, so the technology's here to stay," says Cindi Leive, the outgoing president of the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) and the editor in chief of Glamour. "But the bottom line is that readers should not be misled."

That sounds good in theory, but it's a joke among industry insiders—and anyone with a basic knowledge of graphic design. Leive wouldn't comment on retouching as it relates to Glamour; a spokeswoman told NEWSWEEK that Leive would answer questions for this article only on behalf of ASME. To be fair, the editors of most women's magazines would rather talk about anything but airbrushing. And in the world of fashion isn't misleading the reader, well, the point? "You have to accept that fashion is fantasy. It's wearable art," says Andrew Matusik, a New York fashion photographer and the owner of Digital Retouch, which specializes in celebrity and fashion retouching. "It's all about creating drama."

That might lead us to buy, but it's not making us any healthier. Several studies show that women feel worse about themselves after reading fashion magazines, and kids as young as six are having their photos retouched. An average girl today will see more than 77,000 advertisements by the time she's 12—and you can bet that most of those have been retouched. If that girl is like 42 percent of the population she'll want to be thinner by the time she's a third-grader, and by age 10—if she's like 81 percent of her peers—she'll be afraid of being fat, according to a 2004 global survey by the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. "These techniques underscore the idea that the perfection portrayed in the media is unattainable by natural means," says Cynthia Bulik, a clinical psychologist and the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The question is, do readers know the extent to which their favorite stars have been transformed? Last year the health ministry of Sweden put out a powerful PSA in an effort to spread the word. The spot depicted a 14-year-old girl's transformation from model to cover model. Here's what she endured: her eyebrows were reshaped and her eyelashes lengthened. Her eyes were made whiter and bluer, her teeth straighter and whiter. Her lips were plumped along with her breasts, and her blemishes were removed. Then her hair was lightened and thickened. And finally her nose was slimmed, her chin thinned, and her waist whittled away. "Those young kids looking at the magazines, they're dreaming of something that doesn't exist," says Philippe Paschkes, a Manhattan stylist and makeup artist who has worked in the industry for 30 years.

But is French-style regulation really the answer? Or should the industry be counted on to police itself? When the British edition of GQ was slammed in 2003 for blatantly slimming Kate Winslet on its cover, editor in chief Dylan Jones admitted, "Almost no picture that appears in GQ … has not been digitally altered." Five years later little has changed. Liz Hurley might be OK with that, but there are a whole lot of impressionable young kids who shouldn't be.

© 2008