Britain's Liberal Democrats have been pushing for airbrushed ads to carry notice saying they've been altered, and for retouching to be banned entirely in ads aimed at children under 16. As a result of the campaign the A.S.A. has received more than 1,000 complaints about Photoshopped ads in the past three months, but it has refused to tackle the issue because none of the complaints provided scientific evidence that the ads are harmful, according to The Daily Mail.

Now 44 doctors, psychologists, and academics from Britain, the United States, and Australia have submitted a report to the A.S.A. based on more than 100 academic studies worldwide that says:

Media images that depict ultra-thin, digitally altered women models are linked to body dissatisfaction and unhealthy eating in girls and women.

And argues that the advertisements promote:

Unhealthy dieting regimes and problematic eating behaviours (starving, bingeing, and purging), clinical eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia), cosmetic surgery and extreme exercising.

The paper points out that altered images can be harmful to boys as well, saying pictures that exaggerate a model's muscle development encourage, "unhealthy muscle-enhancing behaviors" like taking steroids, and can cause men to suffer from low self-esteem, reports The Telegraph.

Member of Parliament Jo Swinson, who has been leading the campaign, said:

Airbrushing means that women and young girls are being bombarded with images of people with perfect skin, perfect hair and perfect figures which are impossible to live up to.

Making it clear that retouched images represent an unrealistic ideal is a good start, but the campaign only hints at the larger assault on women's self-esteem. According to The Sun, the report mentions the disturbing fact that:

Girls aged 5½ to 7½ reported less body esteem and greater desire for a thinner body after exposure to images or thin dolls.

Barbie may be part of the problem, but the Liberal Democrats aren't taking on Mattel. The party has acknowledged that thinness isn't the only factor giving girls body image issues by calling for cosmetic surgery ads to include success rates. However, the report submitted to the A.S.A. challenged the idea among advertisers that "thin and sexy sells," by citing research that says ads featuring models who are a U.K. size 14 are as effective at selling products as those featuring extremely thin models as long as they are equally attractive. Would every image featuring an actress with a nose job require a disclaimer letting girls know that her perfectly-proportioned face is "impossible to live up to" without the help of a good plastic surgeon?

While there seems to be scientific proof that retouched images are harming women and the Liberal Democrats mean well, it seems unlikely that a disclaimer will make many people stop hating their bodies. Even if retouching were banned altogether, images can still be distorted with lighting and camera techniques. The hope is that that advertisers will start using more natural models, but sadly, the industry would probably just pressure models to be even thinner if their thighs can't be whittled in Photoshop. Larger models may not be the answer either, since a recent study found that overweight women feel worse about themselves after looking a photos of models, whether the models were skinny or not. At any size, models still represent a beauty ideal that most women can't achieve without turning to extreme diets or cosmetic surgery. The idea that there's a certain beauty ideal women should keep striving (and spending more) to attain may be rooted in advertisements, but it's now too ingrained in our culture to be undone by disclaimer in the fine print.

Call For Ban On Airbrushing Ads That Leave Girls Loathing Their Own Bodies [The Daily Mail]
Airbrushed Images Harming Girls And Boys, Experts Say [The Telegraph]
Faked Model Photo Danger For Girls Aged 5 [The Sun]

Earlier: British Lawmakers Take Stand Against Photoshop
Study: Even Plus-Size Models Lower Self-Esteem

Velez, an Army private, had recently returned from Iraq, where she disarmed bombs. She had served for three years, recently reenlisted for another three, and wanted to become a psychologist to help other soldiers deal with the stress of military life. Her friend Sasha Ramos says she respected the position of Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter. "He's somebody she would have saluted," Ramos said. "It's degrading to all soldiers that he did something like that." • Vandy Beth Glenn has filed a federal lawsuit to get her job at the Georgia General Assembly back after she was fired for being transgender. She had been working as Glenn Morrison and living as Vandy Beth, but she and her supervisor agreed she would start dressing as a woman on Halloween 2006. But she was fired by Georgia Legislative Counsel Sewell Brumby, who said in a deposition, "It makes me think about things I don't like to think about, particularly at work … I think it's unsettling to think of someone dressed in women's clothing with male sexual organs inside that clothing." • According to the American Psychological Association's annual stress survey released earlier this week, women are more likely than men to say they lack the willpower to make lifestyle changes to improve their health. But, Helen Coons, director of the Women's Mental Health Center in Philadelphia, says "willpower" is a misleading term because women may really mean they're too exhausted to make changes and think of themselves as being "selfish" if they put their needs ahead of others'. • A survey of 1,212 doctors published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that many doctors do unnecessary pap smears, adding to heath care costs. Doctors were asked what screening they'd recommend in various situations and most said they'd give a pap smear to a 35-year-old woman with no history of cervical cancer whose cervix had been removed, which is inconsistent with guidelines from several medical associations. • Though many men think women are mainly interested in color when buying a car, a survey by Ipsos Public Affairs for CarMax found 33% of women say price is the most important factor, followed by reliability and fuel efficiency. • Canadian researchers compared 6-year-old children who were breast-fed for 6 months with those who were breast-fed for only three months and found that there were no differences in intelligence, behavior, or blood pressure. While longer breast-feeding gave the children an immunity boost as infants, the researchers say the advantages of breastfeeding do not include lower risks of obesity, asthma, allergy, or dental problems in the long term. • Elizabeth Lambert, the NCAA women's soccer player whose unsportswomanlike behavior was featured on SportsCenter last night has been suspended indefinitely from the University of New Mexico's team. "Liz is a quality student-athlete, but in this instance her actions clearly crossed the line of fair play and good sportsmanship," said her coach, Kit Vela. • A prosecution source in the Amanda Knox trial says her DNA is on the handle of a knife used to kill Meredith Kercher, but the defense still insists there was DNA tampering at the scene of the crime and that the kitchen knife doesn't match Kercher's wounds. Closing arguments in the case begin in two weeks. • Mary Karr, who just published her memoir Lit, says she developed her storytelling ability as a child. She and her mother would play a game when they were driving or her mom was hungover. "Tell me a story she liked to say, meaning charm me - my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me," says Karr. • "Presidents hate the press," says White House reporter Helen Thomas. "They hate me most of the time. ... Asking questions about Watergate, about Monica Lewinsky, they're questions that will hurt and yet you can't avoid them. If you do avoid them, it shows you don't have guts." •

Britain's Liberal Democrats would like to ban Photoshopping entirely in ads aimed at those under 16, and require all other ads to carry a disclaimer describing the extent of their alterations. They also recommend "media literacy" lessons to teach kids about advertising techniques. Member of Parliament Jo Swinson says,

Today's unrealistic idea of what is beautiful means that young girls are under more pressure now than they were even five years ago. Airbrushing means that adverts contain completely unattainable perfect images no one can live up to in real life. We need to help protect children from these pressures and we need to make a start by banning airbrushing in adverts aimed at them.

Coverage of the proposed ban cites the recent removal of Gisele Bundchen's baby bump, and an Olay campaign that appears to have polished Twiggy's face into that of some non-existent twenty- or thirty-year-old. Says the Daily Mail's Richard Simpson of the 59-year-old model,

Out on a grocery shop to her local London Marks and Spencers, a brand she also promotes, she appeared to be the age of, well, a woman of 59.

With slight jowls and only hairline wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, Twiggy does indeed look good for her age.

However she bares very little resemblance to pictures, apparently of her, recently distributed to advertise Olay, whose catchphrase is 'Love the skin you're in.'

Twiggy's campaign is especially upsetting given that she has publicly eschewed plastic surgery and Botox, and advocated "embracing" aging. "I'm grateful for my lines of wisdom," she has said. Apparently Olay isn't.

So should Photoshopping really be banned? Britain and western Europe have historically been more comfortable with speech restrictions than the United States, and it's unlikely that such a ban would ever go down here. But plenty of Americans are angry about the process of retouching — so widespread, according to an LA Times article that namechecks us, that "it's quite possible that the vast majority of images seen in the public arena have been altered." Professor of pop culture Montana Miller tells the Times that advertisers may consciously tailor images to make women feel bad about themselves, thus convincing them to buy more products.

Scott Kelby, president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, counters that Photoshop just makes the camera as forgiving as the eye. He says,

If you met Faith Hill in person, you would think she's absolutely beautiful. And when you take her picture, you will see every flaw that you never saw in person. Those flaws not only become visible, but magnified. . . . If I were talking to someone, I'd look at their eyes, not at the blemish on the side of their face. But as soon as you open up that photo on a 30-inch monitor, you'd say, 'Oh my gosh, where did that come from?'

But retoucher Amy Dresser unwittingly reveals multiple pressures that result in photos like Twiggy's. She says,

When it comes to notable people, I feel like embracing the details of that person's face is what I'm supposed to do. Obviously a person wants to have a nice picture of themselves, and the photographer doesn't want to look bad, and I don't want to look like a lazy retoucher, and the magazine wants an appealing image, so you have to find that middle ground.

According to the Times, she also "says she doesn't take liberties, such as over-softening facial features and turning subjects into plastic-like dolls, a look often seen in rookie Photoshop work. She abhors that style, leaving in freckles and moles and sometimes drawing in stray hairs to retain a person's humanness."

It's pretty sad that our visual culture dictates that someone has to add stray hairs to "retain" a celebrity's humanity — and that an ad for anti-aging treatment has to use a digital anti-ager on its spokesmodel's photograph. Extreme as it seems, a ban could return us to a time before magazines were populated by vaguely human-like cartoons — if advertisers actually abided by it. On the other hand, lets not forget that Photoshop is also force for good — like these photographs of Wolverine and George Clooney without pants.

Photoshopped Images: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly [LA Times]
Don't Beef Up Keira's Bust! Lib Dems Take Aim At Advertisers Over Altered Images [Independent]
Airbrushing Of Photos Should Be Banned, Liberal Democrats Say [Telegraph]
The Two Faces Of Twiggy At 59: How Airbrushing In Olay Ad Hides Truth Of The Skin She's In [Daily Mail]
Pantsed Celebrity Photoshopping Contest [BoingBoing]

Many women are transformed by Dangin's computer stylus, which sits in a basement laboratory at "Box", his four-story, Manhattan Photoshop fortress: In addition to Drew, there is the trophy wife with the "flat" face and "short" legs; the shoulder blade found "in a recent project at W"; the cast of the Sopranos; Prada models; "a famous actress in her late twenties"; a "crunchy"-faced model; "another well known actress"; "an actress with a movie coming out this spring"; Kate Moss; models Liya Kebede and Raquel Zimmerman; Madonna. And then there is model Christy Turlington, who, Collins explains, "needs the least help".

Collins, interestingly (purposefully?) glosses over Dangin's flaws as adeptly as he reshapes a model's nasiolabial folds. Her interview subjects, she explains, liken him to "a translator, an interpreter, a conductor, a ballet dancer articulating choreographed steps". (She compares his work to that of painters Jasper Johns and John Currin; he is, she later explains solemnly, "savantlike".) Collins also seems almost resolutely disinterested in exploring Dangin's role in perpetuating unrealistic standards of beauty and when a photograph ceases to be a photograph and becomes, what Redbook editor Stacy Morrison once said, "an image": most of the critics and/or experts of photo manipulation Collins quotes are all long-dead; the only living people she does quote are all fans of Dangin; and she all but skips over the news that Dangin retouched Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" advertisements. And when she finally gets around to asking Dangin about the work he does and how it affects and defines those aforementioned standards of beauty, she follows his explanation — "I'm just giving the supply to the demand" — with a cynical parenthetical announcing, "fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements." (Yeah, tell that to Newsweek's Jessica Bennett, who put up this story on Friday, quoting a NYC stylist as saying "those young kids looking at the magazines, they're dreaming of something that doesn't exist.")

The work Dangin does, has, not surprisingly, made him very rich. (He owns homes in Manhattan, the Hamptons, and St. Bart's; in addition to the cover portrait of Barrymore, Dangin, with the help of favorite Photoshop tools as the smudge brush, the warping tool, and the clone stamp, retouched — or "tweaked" — 107 advertisements and 36 fashion photographs in the March 2008 issue of Vogue alone.) It has also, interestingly, made him somewhat of a god among the egotistical, easily-unimpressed bigwigs in the fashion and photography industries, who defer to his whims without a second thought. His list of clients is both impressive and iconic: Steven Meisel, Patrick Demarchelier; Annie Leibovitz ("Just by the fact that he works with you, you think you're good"); Inez and Vinoodh; Craig McDean, who says he gives Dangin "carte blanche" to basically do whatever he wants. Whether Dangin enjoys all the adulation and deference that comes his way, Collins does not make clear (nor does she explore the fact that from the photographers to the photo retouchers to the art directors, images of women in fashion magazines are manipulated and decided upon by men before they ever appear before a female fashion editor's eyes.) As for the things Dangin doesn't enjoy — on the women whose photographs he alters, that is — they include the following: ropy blue veins; bony temples; fleshy chins; bumps of all sorts; big knees; "slumpy" legs; bad pores. Oh, and of course, fat asses.

Several days later, Demarchelier returned to the studio to continue winnowing images for the show. The conversation turned to which shot to include of another well-known actress.

"I like her in this one, because she looks very natural," Dangin said.

"Yes," Demarchelier agreed. "In that other pose, she looks like an actress."

"But she's also very good here," Dangin said, of a shot that showed her partially nude.

"Yes, she's very beautiful in that position. Do you want to cut it?"

"No, no. I'm going to keep it for the ass," Dangin said.

"Maybe we could redo the ass."

"Yes, the ass is quite heavy."

Related: Picture Perfect [Newsweek]

Earlier: Photoshop of Horrors
Vogue Cover Girl Drew Barrymore Has Been Powerfully Photoshopped
Our Fifteenth Minute: That Faith Hill Photo Wasn't Actually A Photo, Redbook Editor Explains

When Stephanie Faucher, the design director of Computerworld, was questioned by Folio magazine about the infamous Lebron James image on the cover of Vogue, she answered with her own question: "What better way to sell magazines than to run a controversial cover?"

Except that Folio reports, controversial covers don't always increase sales. Though, writes Joanna Pettas, "It's nice to hear people outside the industry talking about magazines. It's a reminder that print, and magazines in general, still have an impact on social culture." Still, one has to wonder: If women are tired of airbrushed celebs and "perfect" models, and a magazine really wanted to court controversy, wouldn't it be a good idea to publish an untouched cover photograph? I'd buy that, in a heartbeat. Would you?

Liz Hurley Admits She Gets Her Bikini Pictures Airbrushed [Mirror]
Liz Hurley Confesses Love Of Airbrushing [Telegraph]
Why Ridiculous Covers Matter [Folio]
Despite Talk of Ethics Codes, Airbrushing Is Here to Stay [AdAge]
Related: Cover Critique: Vogue's Lebron and Gisele
Earlier: America Ferrera's 'Glamour' Treatment, Revisited
Is Vogue's "LeBron Kong" Cover Offensive?
Mainstream Media Outlets Have Picked Up On The Controversial "LeBron Kong" Vogue Cover

English fashion authorities aren't the only international groups getting upset about the current state of the celebrity-industrial complex. The Women's Forum in Australia released a report in August called Faking It: The Female Image in Young Women's Magazines. And guess what they found? The tyranny of perfection perpetuated by women's magazines makes everyone hate themselves!!

Considering the fashion industry's widespread apathy about anorexia (according to the Guardian, Karl Lagerfeld said the models just had "skinny bones"; Dolce & Gabbana said that anorexia had "nothing to do with fashion"), it's hard to believe that the BFC's suggestions will be truly heard. But who knows? Maybe at some point a faux-celebrity's photographed cellulite won't cause a major media outcry. Fingers crossed!

Magazines criticised for airbrushing models [Telegraph]
Model health recommendations 'not being implemented' [Guardian]

Earlier:
Here's Our Winner! 'Redbook' Shatters Our 'Faith' In Well, Not Publishing, But Maybe God
Breaking News: Jennifer Love Hewitt Is A Human Being
America Ferrera's Glamour Treatment, Revisited

[Emmy Awards image via Splash]

Playboy Evolution Made By Photoshop [YouTube]

Photodropping 100 Pounds Away From This Model [Back In Skinny Jeans via Dethroner]
Related: Evolution Of Beauty — Dove Campaign For Real Beauty [YouTube]