a little girl talk...

I love a read of the Huffington post and always find their star gossip pretty entertaining. I was having a click around when I saw the new Lancome add featuring the ever gorgeous Julia Roberts. She has been photoshopped to magnificence and the question simply put, was this: Should we edit the life out of our images, in particular our models and movie stars, or should we show them as they really are?

What do I think? I am not sure. My immediate reaction is to be very self righteous and say, NO WAY, we should portray the truth in every media. But then I got to thinking that maybe selling beauty is just that, about the 'sell'. We don't want to buy defective goods and services so I guess advertisers are simply trading the ultimate. If our expectation is that Julia Roberts is forever perfect then to see her spots and wrinkles would be complete disillusionment. The truth is we edit all our photos - we over expose, under expose, alter the colours and blur the lines so I am thinking that if it is acceptable to alter photographic images maybe I am unreasonable to deny advertisers and marketers the same courtesy.

But every now and then it does do my jealous little heart good to see some of these glamours not looking too pretty...that's just the girl in me coming out. Tell me your thoughts? Are we editing reality a little too much? xv

image for lancome via the huffington post