You probably noticed since a few months ago that more and more celebrities are going out make up free on purpose. Or are “accidentally” papped with “nothing" on their faces. US television show The view had the whole show presented by unmade up presenters. And now W magazine, the holy grail of fashion cool has done a non-scripted, non-made up fashion story with some very famous people. What up, you may wonder? Have they all of a sudden become all devoid of vanity? Yeah, right.
I call it photoshop damage control PR spin. Not thought of a catchy name yet, feel free to drop me a line if you come up with something better.
We have all seen some images of celebs retouched to infinity so they no longer resemble themselves. Call it the ultimate makeover or whatnot. And rightly so, the general public started to complain, especially if that said celebrity is flogging some “looking younger” cream where the “younger” effects are achieved by some skilled individual on their Apple Mac. And their Adobe CS.
Photoshop in modern digital photography is pretty much a
necessity. Film used to lose some detail but the digital technology picks up
every little bit that the naked eye could not even see. So, it needs to be done,
so it would not be detracting the attention from whatever is being shown.
Imagine a lovely beauty shot advertising mascara and there’s a zit on model’s
face and some fine hairs above the top lip (not calling it a moustache). Once you “spot” those bits it’s like you
can’t stop seeing them. Game over. Mascara what? So you get my point.
But vanity retouching is not just cleaning up the bits like
the skin, hair, etc. It’s body reshaping, eye bags removing, double
chin-ectomy, bingo-wings de-flapper and the usual “how to lose twenty years in
half an hour”.
So some big shot clever PRs, who are paid big bucks to “look after their clients” and assure they keep getting those lucrative endorsements, thought of a great way of doing that. Stars going out with no make up. Genius. The stars still look “good enough” but real. But definitely not perfect to alienate the public.
Except they are really not walking around with zero make up. Just less of it. The Daily Mail machine is working hard to bombard us with those images and make it a “story”. So when you see a celebrity with no make up walking down the street shot, remember they most likely have concealer, a bit of foundation, a bit of blush and some mascara. And lipstick.
So when the celebs get that beauty campaign and get so retouched/botoxed/filler-ed up they can always credit a good make up artist for looking like that. For sure.
