All Girls' High School Retouches Photos to Make Students Look Thinner

Taking their cues from Vogue and Paper, an all-girls high school retouched ID photos to make sure that their student body was looking fly as hell when flashing their papers for discount movie tickets and ice creams. But not everyone is happy with the extreme measures the school took to make their students look bammin’ slammin’ (non) bootylicious.

One student of the unnamed high school took to Reddit to express her outrage with her new photo — which she claims was a second ID issued to everyone apropos of nothing — and point out how ridiculous it is to photoshop young women’s faces, especially when she has spent such a long time learning to love everything about herself.

Here’s what the poster says was changed in the second photo, in which the resident ‘shopper went even crazier than the first:

face smoothing
skin recoloring
lip recoloring
eyebrow smoothing and reshaping
face thinning

That’s a lot. I can see why a high school might want to put its students’ best faces forward, but at the same time, when so much editing goes into the picture, it’s no longer an accurate account of what the person looks like at a point in time, but some kind of fantasy image that once again holds women to an unrealistic standard of beauty. And isn’t the whole point of student photos to get a realistic look of what one looked like during their awkward years? What fun is it to look back on an old yearbook and not chortle at how ridiculous you looked with your acne and also the three bottles of sun-in you accidentally put in your hair because you thought they made your tips look frosted instead of just turning your hair into a bright orange mess (source: experience). And that’s not even mentioning the more important issue at play, that of encouraging self-esteem and loving what one looks like regardless of whether their face is thin or not.

Here’s the poster’s reaction:

I was outraged! I have a round face that I have grown to love and now I get my photo back with a different face. The new photo no longer even looks like me but rather a prettier twin sister. When we go and have our photos taken we are flat out told that our skin will be retouched to hide blemishes. We are not told, however, that more drastic changes are made.

Ok, so the face-smoothing doesn’t seem completely unreasonable, but everything else? Why? It’s not like your high school yearbook photos are entered into some “prettiest high schoolers” competition. It would also be interesting if someone sat down and figured out if photos of male students were just as edited as those of female students. And, as the poster reminds everyone, it’s kind of fucked up that her school preaches body positivity and then does…this.

Going to an all girls school we are constantly reminded about positive body image and accepting ourselves for who we are. Having these changes made to make me appear thinner makes me wonder how must our school practices what they preach.

One commenter points out as a photo retoucher they just give everyone the most perfect photo possible because one never knows who’s going to complain, but is a perfect photo really that important when the person in the picture doesn’t look like themselves anymore?