Tag Archives: photoshop

Image and Identity: New Music Video Asks if We Should Combine the Two

There’s another video out there depicting the extremes to which Photoshop can be taken. This time, it’s the music video for artist Boggie’s song Nouveau Parfum, and it’s not promoting exactly as simple a message as it may seem.

BOGGIE – NOUVEAU PARFUM (official music video) from THE SOUP on Vimeo.

During the music video, performed in French, everything about the subject, Boggie, is changed. Her eye color, hair color, amount of makeup, hairstyle have all been altered. You name it, it’s different.

The most poignant part of the video is right before the end when a newly edited Boggie shares a split screen with her own before image. The difference is staggering and frankly a little unsettling.

Her before image shows a pretty, natural-looking young woman. The after image is an idealized version of what someone thinks women should look like. Ultimately though, underneath the editing, she’s still the same.

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10 Ways the Media is Messing With Our Minds and Bodies

It’s well-known that the media sets crazy standards of beauty and behavior, especially for women. You’d think since we’re all aware of this, it would start to change. However, it seems that the problem is just getting worse. Change will come eventually, but only if we all decide to stop letting magazines, commercials and our daily news tell us how to look, think and act.

We’ve got our list of 10 things the media tries to tell us to get in our heads and influence how we view our bodies. We’ve also included why we think they’re a bunch of hooey.

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Seventeen Magazine Vows Not to Airbrush Models

Adobe Photoshop, the new face of beauty. Whenever we open a magazine, we find models and actresses looking flawless. In fact, they look so good they don’t even seem real. Well, thanks to Adobe Photoshop, anyone in the entertainment industry can achieve this level of ridiculously-good-looking. It’s hard to not say, “I wish I looked like (insert celebrity/model name).” But, we can’t look like them if they are airbrushed!

Julia Bluhm was tired of hearing her peers in ballet class complain about their weight, so the eighth grader started a campaign against altered photos in April. She started her petition on Change.org, she asked for magazines to print one unaltered photo spread once a month. Julia’s petition had more than 80,000 signatures from people around the world. Her campaign proved to be successful when Ann Shoket, Seventeen‘s editor-in-chief, invited Julia for a meeting about the magazine’s new policy on photo enhancements.

Shoket said, the magazine “never has, never will” alter the body or face shapes of its models in an upcoming editor’s letter, which can be seen in Seventeen‘s August’s issue. She also writes that the staff at Seventeen signed an eight-point Body Peace Treaty vowing not to alter natural shapes and include only images of “real girls and models who are healthy.”

“This is a huge victory, and I’m so unbelievably happy,” Bluhm writes on her online petition page about the changes happening at Seventeen. (more…)