Photo: Esther Honey
Esther honey shows how many faces beauty has
For her photo series "Before & After", journalist Esther Honig sent her picture to Photoshop artists around the world. The retouched photos she got back show how different beauty can be.
Face narrower, nose smaller, lips fuller: The use of Photoshop in glossy photos is now no longer a secret. A few clicks on the computer - and the girl from next door becomes a completely new, "improved" person.
The journalist Esther Honig dared the Photoshop-Expriment . For her photo series "Before & After" she presented an unadorned picture of Photoshop artists from 25 different countries. Her request: "Make me beautiful."
"In the US, Photshop has become the symbol of the country's unattainable beauty ideal, " writes Esther Honig on their website, "My Before & After project shows how this scale varies from country to country."
The edited photos show this impressive: In Argentina, she wears bright eyeshadow and pink lips, a German participant makes Esther honey pale and red-haired, in the US is from their Dutt an 80s hair dryer wave and the contribution from Pakistan shows the journalist much tanned, as on the original picture.
"[All these photos] are intriguing and enlightening in their very own way, each picture is a reflection of the creator's personal and cultural beauty, " writes Honey. " Photoshop allows us to fulfill an ideal, but when we see those standards in a global context, the notion of perfection only moves further into the distance."
Finally, Esther Honey's project shows that nobody can match all the different beauty ideals in the world. The best way to deal with this inaccessibility? Just ignore all standards and try to be satisfied with yourself. That's what beauty is, no matter in which country.
