7 Female Celebrities Who Are Against Photoshop
Published on March 23, 2015. Updated April 3, 2017Retouching photos has become pretty standard in Hollywood and some female celebrities are speaking out about it. They aren’t pleased about having their faces and bodies manipulated and they want the practice to stop. We’re not quite sure it will. Magazines have made a fortune giving people unrealistic expectations about beauty. We doubt that they will give that up now or ever. That doesn’t mean that all celebrities are going to ignore the problem. Some of them want to send out a positive message to the general public that not even celebrities are perfect. Here are 7 female celebrates who are against the use of Photoshop!
7. Coco Rocha
Model Coco Rocha is one of the few models out there that has a firm policy against doing nude work, so she was pretty upset when editors at Brazilian Elle magazine used Photoshop to make her look like she was topless.
“As a high fashion model I have long had a policy of no nudity or partial nudity in my photoshoots. For my recent Elle Brazil cover shoot I wore a body suit under a sheer dress, but recently discovered that the body suit was Photoshopped out to give the impression that I am showing much more skin than I actually was or am comfortable with. This was specifically against my expressed verbal and written direction. I’m extremely disappointed that my wishes and contract were ignored. I strongly believe every model has a right to set rules for how she is portrayed and for me these rules were clearly circumvented,” she wrote.
lev radin / Shutterstock.com6. Ashley Benson
A couple of years ago, Ashley Benson wasn’t happy when she saw the new promotional poster for “Pretty Little Liars.” According to her, it was way too photoshopped, so she took to Instagram to air her grievances. “Saw this floating around…hope it’s not the poster. Our faces in this were from 4 years ago…and we all look ridiculous. Way too much photo shop. We all have flaws. No one looks like this. It’s not attractive,” she wrote alongside the poster. Benson ended up getting tons of support on social media from fans. Even one of her co-stars, Troian Bellisario, voiced her support on Instagram. “Wow @itsashbenzo I couldn’t agree more. Very cool concept as always. But aren’t we attractive enough women as we are? Why can’t we just look like us. Once,” Bellisario wrote.
A year later, the girls from “Pretty Little Liars” came under fire for the heavily photoshopped pictures of them that were featured in GQ magazine. Troian Bellisario defended the shoot on Instagram with some unretouched photos.
s_bukley / Shutterstock.com5. Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga has spoken out about the use of Photoshop, but she’s also gone along with the trend without speaking up. When she was accepting her award at Glamour’s 2013 Women of the Year Awards, she delivered a sharp critique of the photos the magazine took of her for their December 2012 issue. “I felt my skin looked too perfect. I felt my hair looked too soft. I do not look like this when I wake up in the morning…I don’t even look like this,” she said. “It is fair to write about the change in your magazines. But what I want to see is the change on your covers…When the covers change, that’s when culture changes.”
The “Telephone” singer has also been a bit a follower when it comes to the use of Photoshop. One year ago, some unretouched photos from her Versace campaign surfaced and she didn’t say a word; however, her website did post them.
Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com4. Jessica Simpson
In 2010, Jessica Simpson appeared on the cover of Marie Claire magazine with no makeup and no retouching. “I absolutely was not wearing makeup,” she told MTV News. “If you look at the cover, you can tell my nose has been broken a couple times. It’s a little [off].”
The whole point of not wearing makeup and not having the photo retouched was to encourage women to embrace their natural beauty. “If you look at a retouched cover of me, and if you look at the Marie Claire cover, you can see that there’s a big difference,” the former reality TV star said. “And I really wanted to show women that I’m just a normal person. [Normally] when I take the pictures, I don’t know what the magazine’s going to do with it after that. I don’t know what the photographer’s gonna do with it after that. It was important for me to make sure that they did not retouch and I was not wearing makeup.”
s_bukley / Shutterstock.com3. Gisele Bundchen
Giesele Bundchen thinks photographers should encourage models to go for a more natural look when shooting advertising campaigns instead of relying on hair, makeup and Photoshop. The Brazilian beauty has nothing but praise for photographers like Johan Lindeberg who embrace women’s imperfections and avoid retouching photos. For her photo shoot for BLK DNM, Lindeberg persuaded her to go without makeup and hairstyling and she was quite happy with the results.
“I feel like women should be really real and raw and it doesn’t happen anymore [in fashion photographs],” she told Fashionista.com. “I love that feeling of, you know, we are women, we are so different, our imperfections are what make us unique and beautiful. He gets that. He’s not trying to retouch you or put a pretty light on you. He’s not like ‘you gotta look a certain way.’ He’s like, ‘you are you’ so now I’m gonna just be here with a camera, so express yourself how you like.”
Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com2. Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet had a major problem with GQ back in 2003. For the magazine’s January issue, they airbrushed her legs so much that she looked like a pin thin model. “The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and more importantly I don’t desire to look like that,” she said. “I actually have a Polaroid that the photographer gave me on the day of the shoot…I can tell you they’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third. For my money it looks pretty good the way it was taken.”
Ironically, in the interview that accompanied the digitally altered photographs, Winslet questioned the idea that women need to be thin to be considered attractive. “What is sexy? All I know from the men I’ve ever spoken to is that they like girls to have an arse on them,” she said. “So why is it that women think in order to be adored they have to be thin? I just don’t understand that way of thinking.”
Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com1. Keira Knightley
Keira Knightley’s body has been manipulated with Photoshop many times in the past. One of the most memorable of these was for the promotional poster for “King Arthur.” She wasn’t a fan of the results. “They always pencil in my boobs,” she told Allure back in 2012. “I was only angry when they were really droopy…For King Arthur, for a poster, they gave me these really strange droopy tits. I thought, well if you’re going to make me fantasy breasts, at least make perky breasts.”
Because of this, she agreed to pose topless for Interview magazine – as long as they didn’t modify her body with Photoshop. “That [shoot] was one of the ones where I said: ‘OK, I’m fine doing the topless shot so long as you don’t make them any bigger or retouch.’ Because it does feel important to say it really doesn’t matter what shape you are,” she told The Times in 2014.
Featureflash / Shutterstock.com