Why You Must See Unretouched Images, And Why You Must See Them Repeatedly

But remember that every day, a young woman somewhere sees one of these overly polished pictures for the first time…and has no idea that they're not real. She may very well have no idea that most waists don't really bend without a roll of flesh, that a 40-year-old woman actually does have some wrinkles, that no mascara will make one's lashes magically long enough to tickle her eyebrows. What the girl does know is that the pictures show What Is Beautiful. She thinks they are reality. And maybe she doesn't have someone in her life to point out that this is complete and utter bull@!$%#. So we'll do that, and we'll do it over and over again just to make sure that everyone knows what's up.

And as long as we're on the topic of bull@!$%#: the degree to which the female-targeted media industrial complex wants to keep these images away from you is shameful. To argue, as did the agency demanding that we remove the above image of Aniston, that it's the before images — those showing Jen with actual texture to her skin (god forbid) — that are the ones which are manipulated is an insulting leap of logic, one that assumes that other media professionals still believe that in real life a celebrity looks as fabulous as she does on a magazine cover (and I should note, the original hi-res images that we took down make a good case for the pics being real, even if the lighting is horrid). And make no mistake, Aniston does look flawless in real life, on the red carpet, on television and in films. But she might have a flyaway hair, or a wrinkle — and the idea that you might see these things preserved for posterity in a magazine…well, that's simply unacceptable! You might buy less SmartWater if you know that its pitchwoman has freckles!