Sunday afternoon . . .

Sunday afternoon. Sunny and lovely, 70 degrees.

So I’m still in the midst of one of the most intense migraines of my life, which means that sitting in front of a computer screen is not in the cards, hence, the dearth of posts.

So anyway, here, have something interesting that I came across in my interwebs travels, a truly remarkable cultural study by journalist Esther Honig:

Before and After

In the U.S. Photoshop has become a symbol of our society’s unobtainable standards for beauty. My project, Before & After, examines how these standards vary across cultures on a global level.

Freelancing platforms, like Fiverr, have allowed me to contract nearly 40 individuals, from more than 25 countries such as Sri Lanka, Ukraine, The Philippines, and Kenya. Some are experts in their field, others are purely amateur.

With a cost ranging from five to thirty dollars, and the hope that each designer will pull from their personal and cultural constructs of beauty to enhance my unaltered image, all I request is that they ‘make me beautiful’.

Below is a selection from the resulting images thus far. They are intriguing and insightful in their own right; each one is a reflection of both the personal and cultural concepts of beauty that pertain to their creator.

Photoshop allows us to achieve our unobtainable standards of beauty, but when we compare those standards on a global scale, achieving the ideal remains all the more elusive.

Follow up: On June 24th, 2014 Before & After went viral. The original publication on Buzzfeed recieved more than 2.5 million views and it was reported on in more than 30 countiries around the world. Included in more than two dozen wellknown publications, Before & After was featured by TIME, The Atlantic, Vice Magazine and The Chicago Tribune. Honig appeared on CNN Internatinoal, Al Jazerra, Good Morning America, The Today Show and CTV. 

Here is the before and the after picture from Argentina. Click here to see the rest of the after pictures and how they reflect the amazing ways in which countries interpret beauty:

I was amazed by what was changed, added, deleted, refined: eye color, makeup, skin lightening, clothes, backgrounds, eyelashes, even stray hairs. But the one that weirded me out the most was India in which Honig’s clavicles were erased. Bone structure? Really?

More later (with any luck). Peace.