My mom, grandma and I went to the photo studio yesterday to look at the engagement photos. To my surprise, the makeup lady (who apparently is also Photoshop Queen) had busted her rump to get our order done so that my mom could pick them up for us. All the larger photos had weatherproofing done on them, giving them a canvas effect, and were mounted on cardstock backing so that we don’t need to find glass-covered frames to put them up. When we got there, the makeup lady opened our package and laid out our photos on a large table for our inspection. The first thing my grandma said was, “NONE of these look like you! How come you look so thin?! Why is your face so long and narrow?”
My mom actually defended me with, “That was the way she looked the day they took the photos. The hairstyle is flattering on her.” And then she said happily, “HEY! Your arms don’t look big in these photos!”
The makeup lady aka Photoshop Queen said, “I’ve cut all those arms down for her in the computer.”
Then the three of us were seated in front of the large monitor as the makeup lady displayed all our photos for my mom and grandma, making note to tell them which ones we’d purchased and which ones we were letting go, giving my mom the option to buy some photos on her own if we didn’t select them. I didn’t select a lot of photos with just me in them, cuz I can’t justify making Mr. W pay half for photos that he isn’t even in. But my mom definitely wanted those. The women discussed how of COURSE the bride gets all these solo photos cuz the wedding is about the BRIDE; the GROOM is just the prop to accompany the bride in all these photos. The makeup lady said engagement/wedding photo session breakdowns are typically 1/3 solo bride photos. And then she added hesitatingly that sometimes a vain groom would fight for camera time with a bride. How funny.

So I asked her, “What DID you change on me? I can tell you altered the arms and you softened my skin and removed my bug bite scar on my shoulder.” The makeup lady opened up an unaltered file of me to do a side-by-side comparison, pointing out her changes. She redefined the jawline (I knew it! I knew I had more significant chipmunk cheeks!), softened the coloring on the face, took AWAY my tan, carved off the bicep, tricep and deltoid muscles on my upper arms, shaved off some forearm muscles (I got those from gripping heavy weights at the gym), and trimmed off my calf muscles! I’m cool with complexion repairs, but SERIOUSLY, how much time have I invested in making my body look a certain way, only to have it photoshopped OUT?! But of course my mom and the makeup lady were happy, talking about how all the customers leaving this studio are delighted with the effects. Obviously they don’t have a lot of Americanized gym rat customers.

(Arms, calf and hamstring shaved off in the above photo. To me it looks like I have the limbs of a quadriplegic. Not that there’s anything wrong with atrophied muscles, it’s just that I don’t have them.)

My grandma out of nowhere said, “Why do you have that on display? I think neither person in there is good-looking.”
I turned and saw her still sitting in front of the monitor with two of my solo photos on the screen. I thought she was implying shutting the monitor off, but then my mom asked her, “Ma, what are you talking about?”
And my grandma pointed to a giant sample portrait of a couple hanging on the wall. “They’re both ugly.”
My mom hit her mother on the shoulder lightly in embarrassed horror, as the makeup lady said awkwardly, “Well, only some people would allow us to use their photo as our sample, others who may look better may not want their photo on display in our store…”
Is this what happens in old age? Like, tact? Tact is for sissies who can’t handle the truth.


(My hands look HUGE in the photo above cuz they slimmed down my arms so dramatically.) This is the photo I’d written about before. My mom said I should’ve done the mouth open, hand on my cheek “ooh!” expression which she thought was really cute, but I DID do that and the photographer didn’t snap that.

My mom ordered 8 extra poses that we hadn’t ordered, and a couple of enlargements of her and the makeup lady’s favorite pose, the one I wrote about in which the makeup lady kept talking about the bust and waist proportions. She did that again this day, fluttering her mouse pointer around the bust and waist and the arc in the back.

(You can ALMOST see the shadowing around my shoulder created by deltoid, but WHERE’S the deltoid?! Where’s the tricep?)

When we got back to our neck of the woods, we called my dad to join us for lunch. He did, and we handed him the envelope of developed photos. My dad knows me so well. He took one look and said, “Hey, they cut out all your muscles!”
“I know,” I wailed, “And I worked so hard for those muscles!”
He chuckled. Then looking more closely at the other photos, he said, “They made you look like a movie star, but you look like a Japanimation cartoon, all white with skinny stringy limbs.”
“I know!” I wailed again.

I totally understand old or fat people loving this type of photoshopping, but I’m not sure I’m a fan. Maybe it’ll grow on me. I’m just not the ultra-femme type. When I brought the photos to Mr. W, pointing out where the editing was done, he (a fan of healthy toned women) exclaimed, “What makes her think she can take this type of liberty with other people’s photos?!” I explained that it’s the cultural and generational difference in perception of beauty. Well, there’s always the wedding day photos that have a chance of looking like me.

You can compare what I actually look like with the (crappy) photos I took of myself yesterday morning.