Lookin' good, by Susie

Go to this website:

http://www.iwanexstudio.com/

Go ahead, it's safe, I promise. It's a top-flight photo retouching studio, and if you go to their portfolio page, you can click on celebrity photos, then roll over them and see what the photos looked like before they fixed them.

My first thought was: wow, I want them to work on me. The difference in some of them is amazing. And then it was like a kid's "which one is different?" game, trying to pick out exactly what they did to each picture.

But I have to say, it does make me a little uncomfortable. No wonder some young girls have a wierd idea of what female beauty is! I when you think that the BEFOREs were probably taken by talented photographers, after hours of work by gifted makeup artist and hairdressers and stylists . . . NOBODY can look like that. Nobody. Skin goes to flawless with the click of a mouse. Notice how they make a little roll around Beyonce's middle disappear, how they sharply define the waist of the already-thin Eva Longhoria.

I think it'd be awfully fun to have them do this to you once. But jeez, it's hard for normal people to live up to. Heck, people who are paid to be gorgeous aren't even close, apparently, if they need that much work done.

I'm not a person who thinks about how people look very often. (Anybody who sees me in my normal life knows that I don't worry about it much.) And I don't have daughters. But it does seem to me it'd be good for us all to see what the beautiful people really look like. (My husband was never so disappointed as when he sat by a very famous model - like, in Sports Illustrated - on a plane once. He didn't believe who she was until she showed him a picture.)

I'm betting we'd all be a lot less worried about our own flaws.

Susie