Colombian singer Karol G has some thoughts on her GQ Mexico cover, shot as part of a profile on her that the magazine published on Thursday. In an Instagram post featuring photos of her bare face without makeup, she wrote in Spanish, “Today my GQ magazine cover was made public, a cover with an image that DOES NOT represent me. My face does not look like this, my body does not look like that, and I feel very happy and comfortable with how I look naturally.”
The singer said that while she was grateful for the opportunity to be on the magazine’s new cover, she’s frustrated that they disregarded her feedback on how they edited photos of her. “Despite making my discontent clear with the number of editions they did with the photo, they didn’t do anything about it, as if to look good, I needed all those changes,” she continued in the post’s caption. “I understand the repercussions this can have, but beyond feeling it’s disrespectful to me, it’s disrespectful to women who wake up looking to feel comfortable with themselves despite society’s stereotypes.”
Fellow artists ranging from Bebe Rexha to Prince Royce jumped into the comments to applaud the singer’s candidness and agree that the magazine “went too far.”
It’s far more common for celebrities to be in the news getting dragged for varying Photoshop fails in clearly manipulated photos they post of themselves, rather than for calling out overzealous edits of themselves. (Recommended reading: this exposé on Newt Gingrich and wife Cally Gingrich’s devoted use of the FaceTune app.) Needless to say, magazines famously take liberties, like, say, Vanity Fair’s hatchet job to Nicole Kidman’s real body in her cover last year, or in 2018, Vogue Italia’s significant darkening of Gigi Hadid’s skin, for which the magazine eventually apologized.
In an age of Instagram filters, FaceTuning, and all the general, ever-fickle trends dictating what our faces should look like, there’s something refreshing about celebrities who use their platforms to burst the bubble of artificiality engulfing our media consumption. May the KarJenner clan consider taking a page from Karol G’s book.