Rumer Willis has called out Vanity Fair for digitally editing her jawline to be smaller.
“Any friends of fans of mine who posted this I would appreciate if you took it down,” she wrote in an Instagram post on Tuesday, just the latest celebrity to publicly comment about how a magazine portrayed her visually. “The photographer Photoshopped my face to make my jaw smaller and I find it really offensive for anyone to try and change the way you look so drastically. I love the way I look and I won’t support anyone who would feel a need to change the way I look to make me beautiful.”
“Whether or not they realize it, it is a form of bullying, which I won’t stand for.”
Willis has spoken about her body image before. On Dancing With the Stars last April, she said she had considered surgery.
“When I was a teenager I was super awkward. I don’t think I really felt comfortable in my body or with how I looked and people were nasty,” she said.
“For years I thought, ‘Maybe I can get plastic surgery... If I change my face or get really skinny, that will be it. That will be the answer.’ And it’s not.”
The photograph in question appears in the was taken for the May issue of Vanity Fair; their spread was part of a shoot about famous sisters, and was shot by Mark Williams and Sara Hirakawa. Neither the photographers nor the magazine has commented yet.
Update (3:10 p.m.): According to a Vanity Fair spokesperson, the image in question was an outtake from the shoot and never appeared in the magazine or the website.
Photographers Mark Williams and Sara Hirakawa provided the Cut with the following statement:
The retouching that was done to the photograph was only done to resolve some distortion with using a wide angle lens for a group shot, and not to alter or modify anyone’s face. We used a wide angle lens, and it might’ve made Rumer’s chin look smaller from the higher angle that we shot the image. We did correct for the optics of the lens slightly as people’s heads get distorted through the wide angle lens. We certainly did not intend to change the way she naturally looks. Our intention was to capture the special bond between Rumer and her sisters.
It saddens us that Rumer feels the way she does about the image and hope she understands that there was never any intention with it to alter her appearance.
We should make clear that this image was an outtake and was not published in Vanity Fair or vf.com nor did they ever see it.