OPINION: CVS bans photoshop from shelves to reinforce honest culture

Every day, people in America are bombarded with ideas of what they should be. Schools tell them that they should be smarter. Society tells them they should be cooler and more popular. Beauty culture tells them they should diet more and have better abs. People are constantly being reminded of what they lack.

After a while, this leads to feelings of inadequacy that never seem to go away.  It is through this feeling of inadequacy that businesses are able to thrive. “Are you embarrassed because you’re a hormonal teenager who has a lot of acne? Buy our twenty different acne products, and you will have amazing skin in a week!”

Businesses create a sort of social standard through marketing and advertising. The businesses then make it possible for their customers to reach that standard by offering them exactly what they now think they need for five easy installments of $29.99.

One of the main ways that businesses have been creating false standards for years is through the use of Photoshop. Photoshop in beauty culture has been a center of controversy for years. Beauty businesses constantly manipulate their advertisements to make their models look as appealing and physically flawless as possible. The problem is, their images are then extremely unrealistic and misleading. People begin to think that the jaw-dropping goddesses they see on billboards are actual representations of what people should look like. This leads to a culture that is totally disillusioned, and this is why Photoshop should never be used on models.

In January, CVS joined the anti-Photoshop movement by announcing that they are committed to creating new standards for post-production alterations of beauty images created for marketing.

“As part of this initiative, transparency for beauty imagery that has been materially altered will be required by the end of 2020,” CVS Health said in a post about the new commitment. “The company also announced that it will introduce the ‘CVS Beauty Mark,’ a watermark that will be used to highlight imagery that has not been materially altered. For this initiative, materially altered is defined as changing or enhancing a person’s shape, size, proportion, skin or eye color, wrinkles or another individual characteristics.”

CVS has been reaching out to its beauty partners with hope that they will cooperate and there have been many promising results. With this movement, CVS will be attempting to help put a stop to the unrealistic body images and unhealthy habits that many people are experiencing today.

“It is time for a refresher course for the media and Americans of what Photoshop was created for originally: bringing a subject more into focus, not creating works of fiction,” Michael Graupman wrote in an article “Photoshop on the Chopping Block.”

There have been many studies that seem to suggest a strong link between the use of Photoshop and negative body imagery in adolescents. According to a study conducted by Common Sense Media, a child advocacy group, one in four children have tried some kind of diet by the age of 7. Additionally, over half of girls and one-third of boys ages 6 to 8 think that they are overweight, even though they are not.

“The effect of media on women’s body dissatisfaction, thin internalization and disordered eating appears to be stronger among young adults than children and adolescents. This may suggest that long-term exposure during childhood and adolescence lays the foundation for the negative effects of media during early adulthood,” the National Eating Disorders Association said in an article about the effects of media on body image. Something should be done about the unrealistic images that are constantly hurled at people day after day, so that people will begin to realize that what they see on their television screens is not normal.

Overall, there seems to be a good amount of support for the steps that companies such as CVS are taking in order to help people achieve healthy body images. While it may not be realistic to abruptly ban companies in the beauty industry from using Photoshop, we should take a page from CVS’s book and make them put some kind of watermark on images that have been manipulated. Through this, we can hopefully create an honest culture that celebrates men and women for who they are instead of reminding them of what they lack.

 

Hrncir is an opinion writer.

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