The Crippling Truth Of Photoshop

The Crippling Truth of Photoshop

Many adolescents throughout the world have experienced this feeling. The disabling sensation that permeates throughout your body and sends a shadow of disappointment across your face; the feeling of being self-conscious. Photoshop was created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll, and has been used worldwide to adjust and alter the appearance of objects within a picture (Wilder). In our world today, photoshop is being used to give models in advertisements clear skin, white teeth, sculpted features, and much more. But what impact would these seemingly simple modifications have on the mind of an adolescent? The effects the use of photoshop has actually carries a staggering amount of negative statistics. After spending

When that is all added up, it results in ten hours and forty-five minutes of media consumption a day. Each minute absorbed where the media is involved also contains time when photoshop is taken in as well. At the age of thirteen, fifty-three percent of teenagers aren’t satisfied with their bodies, and this number increases to seventy-eight percent by the age of seventeen. False advertisement has increasingly become an issue over the years and the effects are pronounced in the esteem of teenagers around the

An 8th grader, Julia Bluhm, from Waterville, Maine has taken the steps necessary to fight these airbrushed advertisements. This fourteen-year-old travelled to New York City and led a protest against photoshop on the doorstep of the owner of Seventeen magazine, a popular teen fashion magazine (Davis and Millman). Bluhm also decided to create a petition asking Seventeen magazine to publish one photo spread a month that hasn’t been photoshopped. This petition gained over 80,000 signatures from all over the world, and forced the popular magazine to make a decision. In the end, Seventeen magazine made a decision to, “not to digitally alter body sizes or face shapes of young women featured in its editorial pages” (Hu). While these are only a few of the millions of photos altered every year, it’s a step in the direction towards changing how the media portrays their images.

One may say that photoshop is used simply for recreational purposes, and that it can be viewed as a way of creating art. It can even be argued that photoshop is used to innocently cover small areas that the model wishes to conceal. While this is a plausible reason, many large makeup and fashion industries tend to abuse this power, and they make modifications that are unnecessary. Some of these modifications include; making body parts appear thinner, skin clearer, and teeth straighter. When industries