Most people are now aware of the fact that most of the pictures they see of models in advertisements are not necessarily real. The person is real, but their attributes are drastically changed during the editing process via Photoshop in order to make said product more appealing. Issues lie in this, however, and it’s been addressed that Photoshop could cause self esteem issues, particularly in young people. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s over. In fact, it seems to be getting worse.

FaceTune is a mediocre Photoshop app that many teens/young adults all around the world use to edit pictures of themselves. I personally see nothing wrong with editing your pictures a bit, but to me there’s a huge difference between editing and Photoshopping. Editing, to me, includes things like fixing the lighting in the picture (adding brightness, saturation, etc.), maybe using their skin smoothing tool, small things like that. Photoshopping is when people start actually changing their faces and/or bodies.

The issue is that of young, influential minds on the internet that see photos like this. They think that they need to look like that, even at such a young age. I even saw an 11-year-old on Instagram who heavily FaceTunes her pictures. Her name is Emery Bingham, and her “fame” began simply by her making YouTube covers of Ariana Grande songs.

She would dress up as her playfully, but now she is constantly in full make up with her hair done, and not to mention her photos Photoshopped. I can’t help but think that she got to this point due to pressure on social media with Photoshop. Once she became popular, she saw other popular influencers heavily editing their pictures, so she thought she had to do the same.

This is the main problem with the level of Photoshop today. It’s not just in advertisements anymore, it’s everywhere we go. There are so many young people on the internet that will get the wrong idea when they are constantly looking at photos of people that aren’t even real photos practically.