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Are These Stars for Real? (Not at All -- They've Been Airbrushed!)

by Jason Rowan on May 19, 2009 at 11:50 PM



In the Golden Era of Hollywood, re-touching photographic stills of movie stars was the standard. The layers of illusion that the studio machine wrapped around the already striking actors was impressive; makeup, ingenious lighting, and delicate, highly sophisticated airbrushing were applied by teams of trained experts. The image you saw of Joan Crawford was unquestionably removed from what the woman would look like without makeup or manipulation. But the limits of the technology -- and the skill and intelligence of the artisans who produced the final images -- kept the bounds of physical reality within check; the stars, while greatly idealized, still looked like themselves.

In the digital age, all that has changed. The explosion of outlets for celebrity imagery (ads, music videos, television commercials and magazine covers) have created a much larger market for retouching, and the digital retouching program Photoshop has met this need (albeit with frequently calamitous results). The ever-increasing celebrity frenzy and fixation on looks promoted by magazines like US Weekly and The Star and sites like Pink is The New Blog have driven standards into a strange, otherworldly zone. The preponderance of plastic surgery, truly heroic dieting and physical training, and overzealous Photoshopping have created a new generation of idealized and, in some cases, not-quite-human images of celebs. While plastic surgery requires some degree of serious contemplation by even the most hardened Botox-junkie, to have your Photoshopper remove every last trace of individuality from your appearance you need only say the word.

Here are just a few of the more notable -- if not notorious -- digital facsimiles.

Tags: celebrity, features, photoshop, photoshopped, top

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