So, everyone’s always going on about hot female celebs, right? As if they just woke up looking like that, all sunshine and magic. Well, I gotta tell ya, from what I’ve seen, it’s a whole different ball game.
It’s not really about just being ‘naturally’ stunning, though I’m sure many of them are beautiful women to start with. But that image you see? That’s a construction. A serious piece of work. Lights, makeup artists by the dozen, stylists, and then, the digital wizards. Loads of digital wizards.
Now, you’re probably thinking, ‘What does this fella know about it?’ Fair enough. I’m no industry bigshot. But I had this job once. Years ago, it was. Just a temp thing, trying to make ends meet. I landed in this small studio, nothing fancy, tucked away in some office building. Thought I’d be designing flyers or something. Turns out, a big chunk of their bread and butter was photo retouching. Not for the super famous A-listers, mind you, but for catalogues, smaller magazines, aspiring models, that kind of stuff. The kind of images that are meant to look like a million bucks, even if they weren’t.
I spent months, man, staring at screens. My job, and the job of others around me, was to ‘clean up’ photos. And ‘clean up’ is putting it mildly. We’d get these raw images. Sometimes the person looked great, just, you know, human. Sometimes they looked tired, had a pimple, whatever. Normal stuff. Then came the list of changes. Smooth the skin. Every single pore. Brighten the eyes. Whiten the teeth. Take a bit off the waist here, add a bit to the hair there. Remove stray hairs you wouldn’t even notice in real life. Sometimes it felt like we were sculpting a whole new person.
I saw photos of women who were already incredibly beautiful, and we’d still be tweaking them for hours. Made me realize, that ‘perfection’ people chase? It’s not real. It’s manufactured. Pixel by pixel. It was kind of depressing, actually. You’d see the ‘before,’ a real person. Then the ‘after,’ this flawless, almost artificial-looking ideal. It messes with your head a bit.
That gig didn’t last forever. The pay was terrible, and my eyes felt like they were gonna fall out. But it taught me a lesson. A big one. Now, when I see those super polished images of celebs looking impossibly ‘hot,’ I don’t really feel envy or anything. I just kinda nod to myself. I think about the team of people, the hours, the software, the endless tiny adjustments that went into creating that one single image. It’s not effortless. It’s a product.
So yeah, that’s my two cents on it. It’s less about ‘hot’ and more about ‘how much work went into making it look hot.’ Makes you appreciate regular, unedited folks a lot more, you know?
