Woman's Photoshop Experiment Shows There Are Many Ways to Be Beautiful

 By 
Stan Schroeder
 on 
Woman's Photoshop Experiment Shows There Are Many Ways to Be Beautiful
Journalist Esther Honig commissioned Photoshop artists from all over the world to touch up a photo of herself. The results are very different: this image shows a comparison between Esther's original photo and the one photoshopped in Morocco. Credit: Esther Honig

What does it mean to be beautiful?

To show how different countries have very different standards when it comes to beauty, journalist Esther Honig had her face photoshopped by people in 26 countries -- and the results are stunningly disparate.

For the project, named "Before & After," Honig used freelancing platforms such as Fiverr, to contract nearly 40 photoshop artists from countries like Ukraine, Kenya and Serbia.

Some of the artists were professionals, while others were amateurs. Honig's request to all of them was simple: "Make me beautiful."

"Photoshop allows us to achieve our unobtainable standards of beauty, but when we compare those standards on a global scale, achieving the ideal remains all the more illusive," explains Honig on the project's website.

While some of the resulting images, like the one from Israel, show pretty subtle changes to the original photo, some (including both examples from the U.S.) go very far, completely changing Esther's facial features. See some of the images in below, and check out the entire gallery on Esther's website.

[nggallery id="17313" layout="list" title="top"]

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