Photo-editing & the Digital Age: What is too much?

I remember, back in 2005, watching Carrie Underwood win American Idol. This was back when social media was barely a thing and American Idol was still a big deal. When she won, she was just a smalltown girl from Oklahoma. In the months that followed, she signed a massive recording contract, glammed up and slimmed down. I remember reading an interview with her in some magazine I used to love (probably Cosmo, as this article dates back to my younger, wilder, kid-free days!) about how she felt about having to succumb to the pressures of Hollywood. You know- about having to put in hair extensions, drop a bunch of weight, bathe in self tanner and so on down this line. Her response (this is not a direct quote, just me remembering it as best I can), was something along the lines of, when people turn on the TV, they want to see a pretty picture. If they don’t see a pretty picture, they change the channel. It’s all part of the game.

I suppose nowadays, with Instagram and Facebook dominating our daily lives, this rings even more true. If people don’t like the picture, if it isn’t pretty enough, glamorous enough, they swipe it away.

In an effort to put myself out there and ease back into the workforce (my youngest starts kindergarten this Fall!), I was hired to write for a new local Website. I was excited when the owner decided to take me on and was hoping to bring my knowledge of all things DFW and all things kid to her site.

She asked me to send her a bio and headshot to put up on her site, not something uncommon. I’ll be honest- I haven’t had a headshot taken of myself since my sorority days at the University of Missouri (and I’ll spare you the details about how long ago that was!). When people do ask for a headshot, I generally find a selfie taken within the last few months where I have on makeup and my hair looks decent and send that over. After all, I’m a writer (or an aspiring writer. Or whatever). The words you are reading are rarely attached to my face. Meaning I don’t have to look like Kate Middleton or Carrie Underwood (both of whom I absolutely adore and simultaneously envy the pants off of!) to be able to write a decent, coherent piece about… well, about anything.

So that’s what I did. I sent over a selfie taken a few months ago in front of the bluebonnets in Ennis. I’m pregnant (and I was then, too), so my cheeks are fuller. While I rarely leave the house without makeup, I prefer a more natural look, using foundation and concealer mostly to cover the acne that has plagued me my whole life and, more recently, the signs of aging I can no longer ignore. So, in this shot, I was wearing sunglasses and some makeup. My hair was blowing in the breeze (and the roots needed a touch up!). We had just hopped out of the car, so I wasn’t wearing lipstick. But overall, it’s a pretty good shot of me. One of my, all things considered, better shots recently.

I woke up the morning after I sent it over to an email from the site owner. The owner had friend-requested me on Facebook several days prior. I have a private Facebook account, and she had gone through my pictures (which is fine, I put them out there) and found one and sent it to her photo editor, and the editor had added a few enhancements to both it and the one I originally sent over, and did I mind if they used one of those?

Now, I’m eight months pregnant. Admittedly, I’m a reactive person. I’m passionate and often hot-headed and I tend to react before I really digest. But when I opened the email and saw the photos, my initial reaction was “What is wrong with me the way I am?”

Because the photos, especially the one they found on social media, were enhanced to a degree that the girl in the photos didn’t look anything like me. The one they so over-edited was a selfie of me on a rainy day at the State Fair back in September. It wasn’t my best selfie, but it was one I felt confident in sharing and portrayed me in real life. With the enhancements, I was wearing extremely heavy eye makeup. My skin was airbrushed to perfection. My lips, which are small and thin, were fuller and wider. The girl in the photo was gorgeous.

The girl in the photo, though, wasn’t me.

Even if I had Carrie’s full team of hair and makeup artists, I don’t think I could achieve this look. Not that I wouldn’t love to! But… It’s not me.

Even the one that I sent, the one of me with the bluebonnets, the photo editor took and retouched. Smoothed my skin. Gave me lipstick and blush. Added bangs. Again, to make the photo prettier.

But all I could think was… What was wrong with the photo the way it was?

I went to the contributors’ page on the Website and thumbed through the photos. Most of them were professional headshots. Perhaps a few of them had been retouched, but they didn’t visibly appear to be that way. They looked professional but natural. One writer had a photo where she was smiling to the point of laughing. She wasn’t coated in makeup. She looked happy and pretty and natural. She didn’t look retouched.

So why had they taken my photos and retouched them so much?

Genuinely, it hurt my feelings. I’m in my mid-thirties, and I’ve come to embrace myself as is. Sure, there are things I wish I could change. There always have been. My laugh lines are becoming harder to ignore. I’ve tried every product on the market to plump my thin lips. I have thin eyebrows. I have chubby cheeks. That’s just me. I have friends and a husband and kids and family who love me the way I am. Half my mom, half my dad. And now half of each of each of my three girls.

So what was this photo retouching, without first asking me, saying about my appearance?

My husband said the photo looked beautiful, although, he admitted, it didn’t look very much like me. He told me if I didn’t like it to tell the owner. To stand up for myself and say no thank you, don’t use these photos, please use the one I sent you as it was.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Was I overreacting? Was I making a mountain out of a molehill (something I often do)? Was I just hormonal and sensitive? It was, after all, a gorgeous photo that looked at least a little tiny bit like me.

So I posted the photo to my private Facebook account, asking for opinions from my 800 friends. The site owner, whom I had admittedly forgot was now a Facebook friend, was privy to the firestorm of responses that ensued.

The resounding opinion was that the retouching in itself was bad enough (that photo isn’t you, said so many) but without my permission made it worse. Some people questioned whether I should even write for the site. Many took it as I did- why did they feel the need to edit the picture? What was wrong with the average me? Were they really concerned people wouldn’t read my words if I wasn’t pretty enough?

I did have a few people express that I should just go with it. That life on the internet is all about putting your best face forward. I admit, I fall victim to it. I won’t post photos where I don’t look my best. I’ll take a picture 10 times before I’ll find one that I like. I share my bests. I boast about how well my kids did in school, the awesome vacation we are planning, the cool event we just participated in. I don’t talk about the nitty gritty of everyday life. Few do. I rarely see my friends posting about the fights with their husbands, the money struggles, the struggles with kids and bullies or kids and school. Social media, especially, is an account of your best life, with few exceptions.

The owner was quick to message me. She was sorry, she said. The photo editor is new and she will talk to her so this doesn’t happen again. She seemed to realize she made a mistake, even if it wasn’t intentional.

I had friends (some I haven’t talked to in years) message me, text me, comment on my post. Almost all telling me I’m beautiful the way I am. That I didn’t need these false image of myself out there. That I should demand more for myself, value myself more than some overdone photo of me.

But it wasn’t really that I needed affirmation that I was enough exactly as I was. I have a husband who regularly tells me I’m beautiful and girls who adore me even after my long runs where I look (and smell!) like something that crawled out of a sewer.

But it had me thinking more about the digital age, the age in which we are raising our kids. This age in which remastering someone’s entire look takes a $5 app and a few taps of a finger- and, most alarmingly, does not require consent or permission. Where, all of the sudden, being gorgeous beyond words and airbrushed to perfection isn’t just for magazines trying to sell you a new pair of jeans or brand of makeup.

Nope. All of the sudden, everyone can be crazy-glamorous without any real effort. We can alter the versions of ourselves we set out there into the world. I can take my selfie in front of the bluebonnets and retouch the background. Was I in Paris? Or maybe in front of the Taj Mahal? I could change the color of my hair or skin to look like someone else entirely.

I guess what I’m left wondering is, why, exactly? Why do we feel the need to alter our lives?

Instagram seems to perpetuate the worst of this. In this age where so many people are trying to become “influencers,” to get freebies or because it seems so glamorous to have thousands upon thousands of people turning to you for advice on what to wear and how to do your makeup or which vacations to take, how do we know what’s real? It took us so long to embrace that the images we were being fed in magazines weren’t real. Hips were trimmed and lips were plumped. Makeup was touched up and skin was unblemished. And it took us so long to say “Even the models in magazines don’t look like their magazine counterparts in real life!”

But now it’s filling up our Instagram feeds, on our phones and our computers and in our faces constantly. Beautiful pictures of beautiful people in exotic places. I once read an interview with an Australian Instagram influencer who admitted she normally took 200-300 photos before she got the perfect shot she retouched and put on Instagram. Three hundred photos? Are you joking?! And then you still retouch it before you put it out there? Who has time for that? So the photos I see of her, all dolled up and gorgeous and relaxed on the beach are completely fake. No way is she relaxed after snapping 300 photos! And she retouches the pictures, so perhaps her smile isn’t genuine, her chest isn’t that big, her hips aren’t that slim, her skin isn’t that flawless. I hit unfollow after I read that. I didn’t need to spend my days comparing even my best version of me with this version of her that didn’t really even exist, apparently.

But this is what our kids are seeing. These people who are famous just for being gorgeous on a beach somewhere. Who are holding sunscreen or mascara or pretty dresses in their hands as they lay casually on a beach. And because they aren’t “models,” they don’t walk catwalks in Milan or pose for the cover of Glamour, we are supposed to think, oh, this girl is just like me!

I follow several local Instagram Influencers in the DFW area, most of whom I have met in real life. One of them explained to me that I needed to get the PicMonkey app if I planned to be featuring a lot of myself on my Facebook blog page or public Instagram account. Because it would make me look flawless. Each time I see a stunning photo of her I cringe. Because each time, each and every single time, I can tell how much it’s been retouched. She’s beautiful, but she’s not flawless. She isn’t in her 20s anymore and doesn’t have perfect skin… But that’s not what you would think if you saw her on Instagram. Another Dallas influencer just started following my page so I flipped over to her profile. Several of her photos were so altered that the faces she had retouched on her photos didn’t even align with her actual face in the pictures. Literally, she looked like a creepy, crazy cartoon version of herself. Do brands really want to work with influencers like this?

Back to that photo…

I’ve saved it on my phone. The Website dropped me, citing creative differences. I guess that is putting it mildly, anyway. But I saved the photo on my phone to be a reminder. To remind me constantly that the way I am is okay. That these laugh lines have come naturally from a life well-lived. That the creases in my forehead have come from traveling with my family and enjoying the good life. That one or two coats of mascara is really all I need- no one wears that much mascara daily, especially not an average, happy-go-lucky suburban soccer mom.

But most of all, it’s a reminder that I have to lead my girls by example. I have to tell them- show them- that they are gorgeous and perfect exactly as they are. They have my husband’s fuller lips and his bright blue eyes. They have my round face and very fair skin. Maybe they’ll never be on the cover of a magazine, but they are wonderful just as they are.

Just like their mama.