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This is what it feels like to have your image used to promote a body shaming photo editing app

Against my will, my 'before' physique – a body that many other men have – was being presented as something that needed to be changed to fit an unrealistic ideal

Hunter Hobbs
Sunday 20 January 2019 16:01 GMT
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New app lets men edit abs, six packs and tattoos onto their photos

Imagine scrolling through your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter feed and coming across a picture or video of yourself in a sponsored post of a company you've never heard of. In my case, it wasn’t a picture of me smiling for a dating site or even promoting a classy pair of sunglasses for half the price. No such luck.

I recently came across an ad and saw myself on one of those “body-changing apps” that can magically photoshop away love handles, slim down faces, or give you six-pack abs with the swipe of a finger. What’s worse, I had not given permission to be used in these ads nor had I received payment.

These apps allow people to perfect their imperfections and modify their bodies to unrealistic standards. Then, as these modified images are posted to social media, they play on and exacerbate people’s issues with self-esteem. Because, even if they have been digitally edited, who can match up to someone with zero imperfections?

The release of the aforementioned advert made it look like I was the frontman for such a message, that I was happy to promote a product that exploited people’s insecurities. But in reality, the app had used the beginning of a year-old video in which I documented my weight loss journey and took a picture every day for 3 months.

Prior to the video, I had gained a lot of weight due to unhealthy eating and workout habits, in addition to my 40-plus-hours per week desk job. So one day I decided to commit to changing my body and took my fitness and diet seriously every single day for 3 months. I also completely cut out alcohol and was consistent with my motivation and dedication throughout.

When I saw this app take my before picture, slim down my waist, and add some abs – all in less than 10 seconds – I was pretty shocked. Initially, I laughed at how ridiculous it was seeing myself with crudely photoshopped defined muscles. But that led to me feeling cheated out of the real hard work I had put in.

At the time, the app had only had about 1,000 views and so I brushed it off. But, within a few weeks, my inbox was blowing up with messages from friends and random people letting me know they had seen me on this app, which was apparently being advertised on every social media platform. Instead of 1,000 views, it now had millions of views on some of the many ads out there.

I even found another app doing the same thing to my body, this time with some tattoos as an added bonus. The comments on most of these sponsored posts were all negative, and a lot of them were directed specifically towards me; people associated me with endorsing the toxic messages behind these apps. I even got a few messages from people saying how they knew I had faked my transformation by relying on them.

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Not only was it extremely embarrassing, but it made me think of what so many apps like this can do to people’s sense of self-worth. My “before” physique – a body that many other men have – was being presented as an “undesirable”; something that needed to be changed to fit people’s perceptions of how a body should really look.

There is nothing worse than seeing your content and something you’ve worked so hard for being stolen. Especially for something as fake and harmful as apps like these.

But in the grand scheme of things, my embarrassment will fade away, and it isn’t the end of the world even if I never get compensation. I’ll just be replaced by another person’s image and the cycle will continue.

This does, however, point to the bigger issue of apps like these profiting from the message that it’s not okay to be happy in your own skin. Seeing what you’d look like with different colour hair or tattoos for fun is one thing, but when you begin to remove every imperfection on your body, it becomes a growing problem that needs to be addressed.

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