Most schools (or the photography services they hire) retouch their students’ photos to hide blemishes — it’s a longstanding practice that most teenagers welcome for obvious reasons. But transforming the entire shape of a student’s face to make her look “thinner”? That’s way out of bounds.
And yet, that’s what one student at an all-girls school experienced this year. Now she’s calling her school out:
I go to an all girls high school and today every senior got a new student ID. We had gotten one in the beginning of the school year and we were all unsure as to why we were given a second. After closer inspection we realized that our photos had be retouched far past smoothing out blemishes. Here is a list of changes made in my photo:
face smoothing
skin recoloring
lip recoloring
eyebrow smoothing and reshaping
face thinning
The saddest portion of the young lady’s diatribe is the quick shift she makes from talking about her natural look as “a round face that she’s grown to love” to, one sentence later, describing her altered picture as a “prettier” version of herself:
I was outraged! I have a round face that I have grown to love and now I get my photo back with a different face. The new photo no longer even looks like me but rather a prettier twin sister. When we go and have our photos taken we are flat out told that our skin will be retouched to hide blemishes. We are not told, however, that more drastic changes are made.
The young lady closed her argument by, appropriately, scolding her school for saying all the right things about body image while blatantly failing to walk that walk:
Going to an all girls school we are constantly reminded about positive body image and accepting ourselves for who we are. Having these changes made to make me appear thinner makes me wonder how must our school practices what they preach.
Here’s a full look at the side-by-side: