The photos Victoria's Secret don't want you to see

 

Thursday 18 October 2012 09:56 BST
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(Getty Images)

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Even the supposedly immaculate Victoria's Secret models get photo-shopped, and Jezebel has unearthed pre and post images.

Many of the details aren't all that shocking, says Jenna Sauers, there's no tail-bumps or missing limbs. In fact, this is "mostly pretty subtle, 'good' Photoshop." The biggest change by far is that the colours have been brightened up and corrected for lighting conditions.

However, the tiny adjustments to these women's bodies shows how far we've travelled into an age of creepy visual "perfectualising".

This paragraph sums up profoundly: "A lot of the things that got Photoshopped out of these Victoria's Secret images — folds of skin visible at Kroes' side when she thrusts out a hip, expression lines, traces of body hair, the texture of her skin — were visible in ad campaigns for global brands and on fashion magazine covers even as recently as the 1990s. We did not use to think of the place where the pectoral muscle meets the armpit as something "ugly" in need of "fixing." We did not use to think that it looked "bad" for a woman to squint slightly in the sun."

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