These Photoshop Parody Ads Reveal The Ugly Truth About Filtered Beauty
Even though Photoshop fails are ubiquitous, many of us still don't realize quite how much our ads and magazine spreads are manipulated. One young women not only found this reality depressing, but also inspiring.
By Sadho Ram — 21 Dec 2013, 05:45 PM — Updated over 10 years ago
Photoshop takes a lot of flack in this day and age, especially when it comes to the beauty and fashion industries. Often that ‘flack’ doesn't give us much to laugh at, but a recent project by Anna Hill does.
In a new series of incisive Photoshops, artist Anna Hill uses the image editing techniques that are ubiquitous in mainstream advertising to turn herself into a model. The resulting parody ads don't market make up or clothes, but instead, the image-perfecting power of Photoshop itself.
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Made as part of her final project for an advanced digital photography class, these parody ads are a sarcastic response to the incredible amount of manipulation that goes into ads for the beauty and fashion industries.
petapixel.comShe put together 4 mock Photoshop ads that poke fun at just how far the beauty industry often takes photo manipulation. Anna made the ads for a final project in an advanced digital photography class, using herself as the model.
Trying to sell Photoshop as an “all-in-one beauty” kit with new “limb lengthening serum” feature, Hill has also cheekily portrayed the photo-editing software as a helpful tool for keeping happy marriages.
Once finished, she decided to share the images on Reddit where they collected a massive number of upvotes and caught the attention of many a blog and news outlet.
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"I thought it would be fun to poke fun at how much beauty ads are overly manipulated," she told the Huffington Post in an email. "They really are altered so much, they may as well be advertising Photoshop rather than the products they actually sell."
In the ads, Hill portrays Photoshop as a magical beauty potion. Wish your legs were longer? 'Shop em!
Commenting on her Reddit post, Hill explained how the project made her aware of the biases that years of flipping through magazine ads have created:
"One thing I noticed when I was doing these that when I suddenly went back to the unedited [image], it looked so wrong and kinda gross. It made me extra aware of how skewed my perception was after looking at the edited ones for a while."
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