“Photoshop: For that poreless android look you’ll never achieve in real life.”

Mock ad for all-in-one beauty from Photoshop

For her final project in an advanced digital photography class at East Carolina University, student Anna Hill decided to highlight the ridiculousness of beauty ads by creating these mock ads for Photoshop itself. As she explains to HuffPo, ads for beauty products “really are altered so much, they may as well be advertising Photoshop rather than the products they actually sell.” 

Posting the images on Reddit, Hill noted,

One thing I noticed when I was doing these that when I suddenly went back to the unedited layer, 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.

Unfortunately, we’re all consuming these edited images pretty much constantly, so it’s nearly impossible to avoid the insidious effect that has on our perception. But a good before-and-after GIF is useful for at least giving yourself a reality check every now and then.

Mock ad for Photoshop

Maya DusenberyMaya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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