Demi Moore extreme photoshop advert

Since the launch of our Real Bodies Unite campaign I have had an avid eye on the media and online, firstly to see who is following our campaign and secondly to watch out for any similar campaigns or opinions that may be forming. This is when I came across an article on Jezebel; a blog for women surrounding the everyday stuff but making it much more interesting!

At the end of January Jezebel delivered an article about Demi Moore’s new advertising campaign for a perfume. This image proves the exact reason why our campaign was started, and I agree completely with Jezebel’s reaction to the photographs.

Demi Moore is a beautiful woman and yet the perfume company feel there is a need to make dramatic alterations to her appearance and to be honest, she looks plastic! No wonder women, including myself, see adverts and think ‘I will never look like that’ and eat cookies or starve themselves to achieve something which is not reality or a healthy image portrayal. I no longer buy glossy magazines for this exact reason, I think why subject myself to imagery that makes me feel inadequate? But there is no getting away from this, it’s on TV, billboards, and on the web. This is why the campaign was launched, beauty is unique, different and comes in every size there is – there should be no ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’, it should be inclusive of everyone.

“We’re not out to play “gotcha” here — as far as we’re concerned, the main thing this behind-the-scenes snapshot proves is that Demi Moore is a gorgeous woman. But given the raft of manipulations her photograph underwent in the course of its transformation from something resembling the shot on the right to that creation on the left, it’s clear that to the contemporary beauty industry, being gorgeous is not enough. Breasts need lifting, hair needs thickening and cloning, little bits of flesh around the shoulders and upper torso that might bulge out when lying down on a hard surface need siphoning off, cleavage needs enhancing, the little lines on palms and neck that show skin, you know, creases with movement — those need to be liquified away. And skin needs a plasticky airbrushing, a total post-production resurfacing, because anything on a billboard that had a visual artifact of the texture of a human being might…might what? Alienate the audience? The point isn’t that Demi Moore looks bad because of this Photoshop. It’s that Photoshop this thorough makes her look nothing like a human being.

We now live in a world that forces us to consider every image of a woman we encounter to have been extensively altered, unless and until proven otherwise. And yet, unretouched shots of models and actors are just a click away — whether they be paparazzi snaps or candids tweeted by a loved-one. In these circumstances, it only gets curiouser and curiouser that beauty companies insist on pursuing their relentless campaign of visual manipulation. We can disprove these fallacious accounts of the stars’ appearances in seconds; why the pretense?”

So thank you Jezebel, for putting this into perfect perspective. Please sign our petition to get body diversity into the fashion industry and reduce this ‘need’ for airbrushing.