Heather pointed it last week.

Today, A-list bloggers Matt Yglesius and Ezra Klein are talking about it, the latter writing:

You’ve got to click the link — it’s an extraordinary clip. Weirdly, though, this video — where a plain model is heavily made-up, lighted, and digitally altered to become a stunningly beautiful billboard creature — almost democratizes the standards of beauty by showing how anyone could become a superstar in print, and how false and superficial the ending "product" is. More pernicious, at least to my eyes, are movies and television, which rely on some of the same trickery, but mainly "cheat" by hiring outliers on the beauty scale and then placing them in shows and scenes that retain the atmospherics of normality. By skimming actresses from the 99.999th percentile of attractiveness and then using them in apparent representations of reality, they create an ideal and expectation that, while theoretically more achievable than the photoshopped model from the video, is actually far less realizable.

See what they’re talking about: here or here.

Through photo manipulation and other modern techniques, we’re creating a society where the standard of beauty is so high that it is unobtainable.  What’s the effect?  From the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty:

Girls can grow up feeling inadequate, fret about their bodies and their looks and feel bad if they don’t conform to the pictures of beauty they see projected on them from TV screens, billboards and ads. They can feel they need to change themselves, to diet away their natural shape, exercise compulsively and have cosmetic surgery to feel acceptable. Every girl and woman recognises that beauty is important. But often they do not see themselves as attractive because their uniqueness has not been reflected back to them. What they see in their mirror is someone who is unlike the models.

Of course, the models themselves don’t even look like the models (as this before/after demonstrates — click to enlarge):

Time to get real.