Unbelievable: Esther Honig Has Her Picture Photoshopped In 25 Different Countries [Photos]

From Beyonce’s Instagram to adding modesty to High School yearbooks, our world is inundated with photoshopped images of men and women designed to appeal to the masses’ standard of true beauty, but who defines beauty? Esther Honig, a journalist and blogger, decided to tackle the issue and find out how standards of beauty differ across country lines with her photo project titled “Before and After”.

Honig states:

In the U.S. Photoshop has become a symbol of our society’s unobtainable standards for beauty. My project, Before & After, examines how these standards vary across cultures on a global level.

To do so, she submitted a simple assignment offer to Fiverr. What happened next is nothing short of remarkable. Honig’s request was simple according to The Huffington Post . Esther sent a photo to people in 25 countries and asked them to, “make me look beautiful.” As the images started pouring back in to Honig she was blown away by the stark differences in the definition of beauty across the globe.

You can see all of Esther’s photos below:

As you can see from the photos, each country had a distinct look and definition of beautiful. Religion made an appearance in the Hijab added in the Morocco photo. Others valued a women’s use of makeup such as Argentina and Greece.

Honig notes:

Photoshop allows us to achieve our unobtainable standards of beauty, but when we compare those standards on a global scale, achieving the ideal remains all the more elusive.

It is important to note that standards of beauty even within the same country can vary drastically. Take the United States for example, you can see the more alien-like photo in the gallery above created by an American photoshop artist and compare it to this one below, also a sample from the United States.

Some differences also come from the experience level of the one doing the photoshopping. Esther notes that projects ranged in price from $5 to $30 and experience level varied across the board. What we do know is that the standard of beauty is as illusive as ever and varies greatly between regions and even religions. Darker skin tones versus paler tones, darker hair versus lighter hair, more makeup versus a natural look, the images are all over the spectrum making it incredibly difficult to pinpoint exactly what “beautiful” really is globally.

What do you think of Esther Honig’s “Before and After” project? Do you see photoshop and the definition of beauty any differently now?