Creams that lengthen limbs and mascara that makes eyelashes longer use real people to shoot advertisements, but the resulting photographs are often drastically altered versions of the models.
One photographer, 24-year-old Anna Hill, wanted to show just how much a person can be airbrushed.
In a series of self-portraits titled "Beauty Is Only Pixel Deep," Hill excessively photoshoped her pictures in an attempt to call attention to the beauty industry's obsessive use of airbrushing, Yahoo! Shine reported.
Hill, who said she taught herself to use Photoshop at 14, can easily spot when a beauty advertisement has been altered. The results don't advertise the true product.
"I thought it would be fun to turn them around and point out how ridiculous they can be," Hill told The Huffington Post United Kingdom. "I did over-the-top editing to my own self portraits, making Photoshop the advertised product instead."
In one picture, Hill poses in a mock advertisement for a product that promises longer limbs. Her normal body appears in the "before" photo, but her arms, legs and torso appear magically elongated in the "after" photo.
"Mascara ads always promise women lashes that are 50 percent longer, but most companies don't actually use their product in their own advertising; they digitally enhance the models' eyelashes," Hill told Yahoo! Shine. "I applied that idea to a limb-lengthening serum that promised 50 percent longer legs."
Hill, a senior at East Carolina University, originally did the photos for a class assignment. She posted the pictures on Reddit on Monday, Yahoo! Shine reported.
"I think people like to be reminded that the beautiful models we're surrounded by daily aren't actually as real as they seem- without excessive makeup and editing, many don't look that much better than the rest of us," Hill told Yahoo! Shine. "
Hill's self-portraits can be viewed here.
