The negative effects Photoshop can have on our society

Have you ever seen an image of a model in a magazine and thought to yourself “Wow, I wish I looked that perfect?” You are not the only one. They appear perfect; however, the images we view of these women and men are 99.9% not how they actually look. They use a tremendous amount of photoshop to create a look they could not even achieve themselves. Yes, looking at these images have an outcome of someone staring unhappily in the mirror, not seeing perfect skin and looking at perfect people in pictures for hours and then looking at yourself, you seem to come across every blemish and fault that the models in the pictures did not have. Having the idea that you could never look as flawless as the unreal people in magazines does has the power to lower your self-esteem. You do not really know how bad you feel about your looks until you see teeth as bright as the sun, the perfect Coke bottle body shape, and the flawless sun-kissed skin in your favorite magazine. Photoshopped images make you look and feel better, but then again it portrays an unrealistic person that is hardly yourself. Everyone has flaws, but with this photoshop madness, these flaws are erased. With no flaws in these images, there is no limit to how far someone will go to get that level of perfection, even though that level is unachievable because a great deal of lighting, smoothing and shrinking has been added to the image. The more photoshop is being used to clear up insecurities, the more it is just adding to ours. If you see before and after photos, you will realize that people in the photoshopped images are not as perfect as they claim to be. And we should not feel bad about ourselves because of this, but we do. Seeing how a size 10 model can be photoshopped down to a size 1 is ridiculous. How can wrinkles vanish inconspicuously, uneven skin tones be evened out, dark circles erased, and stretch marks blurred? In real life, this is not possible to be completely without a blemish or flaw. So, when we see all of these photoshopped images we start putting our heads down in shame knowing we cannot look as impeccable as these fake images display.

Altering images to try and fit the society’s way of how people should look is nonsense. We will never look like that and it is just making people’s self-esteem worse because we will go to the end of the world and back to figure out every secret to acquire glowing skin and youthful-looking skin like the individuals in our magazine. But the secret is all in the image: it is a little thing called photoshop, and it is ruining the way we look at ourselves.