Mightier than the Airbrush

In a recent Shine piece, a staff writer praises the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority for a ban on digitally-altered ads. The ASA had received complaints from the public, claiming that Olay’s ads were “socially irresponsible” and could give consumers a misleading impression of what the product could do for them. In the ads Twiggy claims that she owes her brighter-looking eyes to Olay. Olay admited to “minor retouching” of the 59-year-old’s crows feet and thus caught the wrath of UK’s public, the ASA and a Shine writer. The pens of UK’s scribes being mightier than the airbrush, we – or at least the Brits – can now rest assured that the advertising photos they view show things as they are. Yeah, right.

The ASA regulation seems to be utterly unenforceable. Unless they intend to individually approve each advertising photo, the ban could only be enforced when advertisers do such a ridiculous job of reworking a photo that they get caught. Demi Moore’s hips on the cover of the W magazine and a controversial Ralph Lauren advertisment come to mind.  As long as you retain only one version of an altered photo, it would be rare that anyone could prove that alterations occurred.

Also, every photo that was digitized by a camera or at any point in the printing process has been digitally altered. Any decent prosecuting attorney could argue that the use of a printer profile for a specific type of ink constitutes a digital alteration. If that were declared out of scope of ASA ban then we have to draw the line somewhere between printer profiles and unrestrained use of Photoshop’s Healing Brush. What about nonlinear contrast adjustments, tone mapping and selective color replacements. These could dramatically affect a viewer’s judgment of the effectiveness of Olay’s product too. Should we require that exactly the same curves and brightness adjustments be made to the Before picture and the After picture in before/after testimonials?

If we could come up with a lengthy legal definition of what is really meant by digital alteration – and I’m sure there’d be no shortage of attorneys to author it- would the public then be safe from deceptive advertising photos? Perhaps to the degree we were in the pre-digital era – which was not very. Unless we can effectively regulate photo lighting methods, the use of makeup, and weight-loss models’ abilities to stick their bellies out in one shot and suck them in for another, the viewer is still going to need to come up with the sense the God gave geese. Consumers might want to apply a bit of skepticism to more than just the photos in an advertisement.

Neither of the above photos have been digitally altered. They show the result of certain facial therapy I developed myself. In the first photo, my eye is lit by a bare bulb at about 60 degrees left of the camera. The second is lit by that same bulb fired into a 32-inch umbrella adjacent to the camera. The facial therapy consisted of adding an umbrella to the flash head and moving it to a different position between the two shots. As you can see, this therapy produces dramatic results, and I owe my younger looking eye area to it. The Advertising Standards Authority might that their new tough legislation still exposes consumers to “socially irresponsible” advertising.

All the model photos on this page (except my eye of course) are of the same woman. No digital alterations have been made.  (My eye.)