What’s the quickest way to lose 5 pounds? Why Photoshop, of course. If you’ve picked up a magazine anytime in the last 15 years, you’ve probably been treated to a digitally manipulated parody of the human form. The practice of photoshopping flaws out of models, celebrities and musicians has become so commonplace, we almost don’t think about it, but the unrealistic expectations set these visual falsehoods creates artificial standards of beauty. Now, the Brave Girls Alliance is fighting back, asking advertises to take a “Hero’s Pledge” to not alter the shape of size of their models or, if they do, to clearly mark the altered images as photoshopped and unrealistic. The first company to sign up? ModCloth, a popular online clothing retailer.
The days of impossibly thin models and botched Photoshop jobs may soon be behind us. Yesterday, ModCloth, an e-retailer specializing in vintage-inspired and independently created clothing and other accessories, became the first retailer to sign the “Heroes Pledge For Advertisers,” promising not to “change the shape, size, proportion, color and/or remove/enhance the physical features” of models in advertisements post-production. This marks an important victory for the anti-airbrushing activists behind the Truth In Advertising Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in March that calls for the government to create a regulatory framework for advertisements to ensure they aren’t deceiving – in other words, that marketers aren’t Photoshopping models too much. Today, 72% of girls feel tremendous pressure to be beautiful while only 4% of women around the world consider themselves to be beautiful, according to company research from Dove, whose controversial Real Beauty campaign was launched in 2004 to promote body confidence and self love among women of all shapes and sizes. Many airbrush opponents blame much of these feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem – not to mention an increased rate of disordered eating among adolescents — on the impossible beauty standards perpetuated through advertisements for everything from eyeliner to bathing suits featuring already-thin models airbrushed to near-oblivion. And there are numerous studies to back up those assertions.
