The Beauty Myth, Male Edition (Welcome Boys!)

WebWire: “Clinique Skin Supplies for Men launches new website Cliniqueformen.co.uk”

My favorite product: NEW Age Defense Hydrator SPF 15 (see pic above, link here).

Absolute killer: the male voice-over on Clinique’s website, reciting instructions on how to use it – paraphrasing: “if you want to erase fine lines, apply it every morning.”

Boys, men, welcome to the beauty myth. Enjoy the ride.

Airbrushing Double Standard: Brad Pitt vs. Sarah Palin

In October 2008, Newsweek magazine put an unretouched photo of Sarah Palin (b. 1964) on its cover – which left quite a few people speechless, and the Republican camp outraged, since 99.99999 percent of photos in print media are airbrushed, to remove wrinkles, blemishes and other “imperfections” common to all human beings.

Brad Pitt (b. 1963, thus a year older than Ms. Palin), recently grazed the cover of W magazine – close up, unretouched. I didn’t see any people running for cover. Or claiming this was outrageous. To the contrary, there seems to be something valiant about Mr. Pitt’s “rebelling” against Photoshop.

Could it be that there is a gender double standard at play? When was the last time we saw an unretouched photo of a woman, close-up, on a mainstream magazine cover? I can’t possibly think of any examples…

Why should we be shocked/outraged/or downright embarrassed for a photo of a 44 year old woman with a naturally wrinkled face and not have the same reaction when it comes to a man?

(You ask me, Sarah Palin looks beautiful in that pic, and Brad Pitt looks like he belongs to a different – older – generation compared to her.)

UPDATE: 01/30

The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly has a close-up picture of President Obama (I just love saying that) on its cover. It is unretouched – and thus shows all of his face’s fine lines. I didn’t read/hear about anyone objecting to it. Again, gender double standard at play here?

Annals of Deception: Image Retouching in Music Videos

Check this out: http://is.gd/fGoi

The Atlanta Journal Constitution: HDTV drives search for complexion perfection

Excerpt:

Actors, models and television personalities are accustomed to leading on-air lives in soft focus. But with the advent of all-digital television next month, the stage is set for unforgiving high-definition broadcasts, and even everyday people want to look airbrushed to perfection.

In our hyper-magnified world where HDTV, HD camcorders and point-and-shoot cameras with auto-airbrushing functions are becoming the norm, a blemish here, a pockmark there or even a wisp of a wrinkle is unacceptable.

In theory, the sharper images transmitted over high-definition digital television mean the skin has to look almost perfect. Which is to say that it has to look natural, fresh and dewy, not powdery and masklike as it did in the analog days.

Full article here.

Debra Winger on Hollywood and Ageism

From The Guardian (full article here):

“Yeah, those boiled faces!” she says, when I bring up the tricky subject of her female colleagues’ waxwork skin. “Scary. They go in [to see their doctors] saying: make me look like myself – or like myself 20 years ago. But you know, I have a movie out now and I can’t bear to watch it. I see myself up there, and it’s not normal to scrutinise your own face on a screen this big; it’s like opening a vein. So I do have some compassion for Nicole Kidman, or whoever, who has obviously looked at her face and sort of dissected it, like it’s a thing. I don’t want to be the poster child for wrinkles, and that’s what they make you if you speak out about that whole culture. So I don’t, mostly. But it has gotten so ridiculous as a job. [At the film festivals] the celebrities are dragging their movies in, going ‘look at this!’ instead of the movie being the thing, and they’re just there to support it. It’s a case of: ‘Look at my dress, at my hair, at my face and … oh, by the way, there’s a movie here, too!’ I have this character in my head. She keeps appearing places: on trains, in the city, on the highway. I see her out there. She is heroic, but not like any hero we’ve ever seen. Society makes women of a certain age invisible. It’s convenient. Remember our mothers? How inconvenient they were to us? It’s like that, on a grand scale. In the early part of my life I carried the flame for fiery women: perky women who were not dumb. And now I feel like I could be the woman to play this role: the invisible woman.” Only no one is writing these kinds of parts. “Roles for women. There aren’t any. They’ve been saying that since the 1920s, and it’s true. [My theory is that] women don’t write enough. Because who do they expect to write these roles? Men?”

via Jezebel.

Outrageously Deceptive Ads: VICHY Normaderm Cream

My first thought upon seeing this ad in the back of a French magazine: “You have to be kidding me!”

This is obviously a BEFORE-and-AFTER Photoshop photo, not an illustration of BEFORE-and-AFTER “I have used Vichy Normaderm“. Unless the cream erases your skin pores, that is.