Pop Culture

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Are any celebrity photos real anymore?

Kim's 'Sixth Toe'

In a photoshoot promoting their joint fragrance collection, Kim Kardashian and her sister Kylie walk side-by-side wearing one-legged bodysuits. Many viewers zoomed in on Kardashian's left foot, which appeared to have six toes. One Instagram user wrote "Am I tripping or does Kim have 6 toes? Someone explain, I'm so confused! I counted so many times".

Kylie's Sus Snaps From Turks and Caicos

In 2019, Kylie Jenner took friends on a trip to Turks and Caicos to celebrate the launch of her skincare line, Kylie Skin. One particular photo taken on the trip was clearly edited. The left leg of Kylie’s friend, Stassie Karanikolaou, looked suspiciously thin and curved. "I'll come back and check this later when the rest of the legs finished uploading," one Instagram comment read.

Social media and celebrity news and culture is, in the main, superficial. The focus is surface appearances: what people look and dress like, what car they drive, how big their house is, whom they appear to be friends with and who they are in a relationship with.

Celebrities are idolised for how “pretty” and “in-shape” they are, or how clear their skin is. On the flip side, they are brutally and publically shamed if they are caught looking average, i.e. like a normal person.

This scrutiny creates a huge amount of pressure on celebrities who, more often than not, go to huge lengths to meet socially constructed expectations. The pressure is so great that celebrities and advertisers struggle to meet these ever growing and unrealistic expectations and so have resorted to relying on carefully editing photographs instead.

It is estimated that 99.9% of all publically shared celebrity photos are edited to some extent. This editing is hidden and has a knock on effect on young impressionable minds, giving them a constant sense of inadequacy, and in turn having detrimental consequences for their physical and psychological health. Looking at photos of people online, e.g. scrolling through Instagram, has been linked with feeling more negatively about our own bodies.

Photoshop, filters and other photo editing tools, mean that we now don’t have to be a graphic designer to modify our appearance in photos. This has resulted in over two thirds of us editing photos of ourselves before posting them online.

Compared to photos of celebrities, we can feel even worse about our bodies when we look at photos of people we know. In addition, women have been found to feel worse about themselves after posting a selfie online, even if they have edited the photo in some way.

Disengaging with social media and celebrity culture, partly or even better completely, is the best thing we can do to protect ourselves from the many subtle and harmful effects that they have on us.