Jezebel brought down a sh*t storm last week when they posted these Faith Hill before and after shots from her recent Redbook cover. The interwebs were aflame as everyone scrambled to board the Outraged Express: How dare the media propagate this kind of lie? The real Faith looked better! When will the truth become our common currency? (Answers: because it makes them rich, yes sort of, and check back on the 10th of Never.)
Everyone is right. The retouching is offensive. But why is everyone so surprised? We've seen dramatic examples of this before.
Remember the Dove Evolution commercial where they showed how to make a perfectly beautiful model even more beautiful, from lighting to hair, makeup and retouching? Here is another video from YouTube that shows "extreme retouching" in which everyone gets a new eye color. Search Google for "retouching examples" and you'll find links like this. Stacy Morrison, editor-in-chief of Redbook, responded to the Jezebel induced frenzy by saying what they did was industry standard retouching. Sadly, that's true.
The thing that fries my bacon is the more intricate lie that goes along with the cover photo that every "knows" is retouched. Read the words that go with the picture and tell your brain how to interpret that openly fake photo. In marketing we call it positioning, but you can just think of it as The Story They Want You to Buy. And I do mean buy.
Stacy Morrison blogged
about the photo shoot that resulted in The Cover Seen Round the
Internet. She calls Faith "genuine" and refers to how photographers
make subjects look good with "lighting and whatnot." In two simple
sentences, she positions what you see as the real deal because Faith =
genuine, and anything done to make the photo look better as a
combination of good light (OMG those pink light bulbs work wonders!)
and some technical adjustments too minor to actually name.
Inside the issue is a Q&A with Faith and Tim. The first paragraph sets the readers' perceptions and experience by calling the pair "unfiltered," i.e. believe that what you see is what you get, without artifice or manipulation. This is right under another obviously Photoshopped image of Faith.
In the Q&A the two talk about their kids, balancing family with work, and a lot about food. Southern comfort food, yummy, delicious carb-filled goodness. Subtext: Faith is a Mom with like you, she has the same concerns that you do, she eats the kind of food you like, and she looks like that picture. The stars are just like us! If you try hard enough you can eat that way and have that amazing body. Without wrinkles! But of course you need help, everyone does, and you can figure out how to buy the right diet book, botox or skinny pill by reading the magazine.
Redbook picked Faith to be on their cover to leverage her personal brand of accessible, authentic Mom and turn readers who identiy with her into consumers through Faith's tacit endorsement of everything in the publication. Redbook reinforces Faith's brand through positioning (she's so down to earth!) and provides visual cues of what we're conditioned to desire (skinny and good hair.) Then the magazine is packed with ads for things that by association will make you just like the picture of Faith on the cover. The fact that it's fake and perpetually unattainable means we're all doomed to be repeat buyers. Genius!
I wonder what Faith thinks about all this. If she's selling her image this way on purpose, or if she's being manipulated like the rest of us. And I wonder how she explains things like this to her three daughters.
Mostly I wonder how much longer we're all going to be willing dupes to the photos and the words and the marketing. I think it's time to cancel a couple of magazine subscriptions and see if that gets anyone's attention.
Photo credit: Jezebel
