“Nah… No… OMG, this looks worse!”
Ah, are you wondering what am I doing now? I am just looking for a perfect picture to upload it as my display picture in WhatsApp. It is so difficult to choose a picture for my DP. I, once, asked my mother’s suggestion in choosing the picture in which I look pretty. She said that every picture looks good. But when I looked at those photos, I was like, “How could she say that these pictures are good; they don’t even look like me.” Then I downloaded YouCam Perfect to look perfect. It showed the ideal version of me. But then, the first sentence I would hear whenever I meet people whom I got to know through social media is, “You look so different from your WhatsApp profile picture” or “Did you do something to your face? Have you gained weight?” I am quite sure that all of us would have heard this at some point in our life. That’s when I realized my mom was right. I always wanted the ideal version of me and lost my own image. Do our eyes really see our real image in the mirror or the ideal image that we want us to be?
I have read this short story, With the Photographer, by Stephen Leacock, where he talks about a narrator who is unhappy with her photograph. It is because the photographer has PhotoShopped the narrator’s picture too much. The narrator is disappointed as the photographer has judged her appearance and has changed her looks based on his idea of beauty. But now, people, including me, want a picture that makes others say, “What a beauty!” or “How handsome he is!” and so we all terribly want a photographer like the one in Stephen Leacock’s. We do not care about the real different us. This is just an example to show how much people wanted to avoid reality. They go behind the ideal things and miss admiring their own real beauty and everything around them. You think you do not do that? Here again, you deceive yourself with the idea of perfection, and you are too blind to look at the reality.
Look at these two pictures:
Kim Cattrall (Before and After Photoshopped)
What is wrong with showing your wrinkles to the world? Is getting old not alluring?
Manarola, Italy. (After and Before Photoshopped)
Which one do you think is good?
I asked the same question to my colleagues. I showed the before and after Photoshop pictures to them. When they saw the before pictures, they weren’t so impressed. But after showing the after pictures, their jaw dropped. To them, the actress looks too good in the after Photoshop picture. Even the tourist agencies Photoshop the tourist places to attract people. Why do we all hate reality so much?
We all have a universalized concept of beauty. A place should be bright and colorful to look appealing. A woman should be fair and fit with long hair to be called beautiful by society and also by herself. A man should have six packs and sharp eyes for everyone to call him handsome. I do not know who has set all these rules, but I do know we all live by those rules. And with technological advancement, I think we would fall deeper into the well, and not come out of it. I am not an exception. I have finally found my perfect “YouCam Perfect” picture for my DP. Bye folks… I am signing out… gotta upload.