We airbrush models and magazine centerfolds without much thought. Beauty, we’re told, is only skin-deep, and our models need to represent the image of perfection.
And the lines of just whom we can mold into that model of perfection are becoming more blurred, according to a recent report.
Increasingly, the New York Times says, school photographers are digitally manipulating school portraits of children to erase bodily imperfections, including acne marks, blemishes, moles and other unbecoming traits that don’t conform to traditional beauty.
Children’s perceptions of physical beauty have been warped long before any school portrait has been taken. From the Disney effect on what constitutes beauty to the thousands of advertisements they have been exposed to, their concepts of beauty have been defined before they even enter elementary school. And now, those children’s very own pictures might be altered to fit a more beautiful standard.
But when a photographer takes it into his or her own hands to change a child’s image without parental consent, more harm is done to that child than had ever been imagined.
In effect, with the altering of a child’s photo, we are telling our children beauty really is only skin deep, and, unfortunately, you just don’t make the cut.
Children need to be taught lessons of the variety of beauty and the inability to truly define what that word means. Manipulating anyone’s photo, magazine model or child, to adhere to any socially prescribed definition of the word, sends a very ugly message.
