Where We Stand on “Fotoshop”

Working for a women’s website or magazine is a little like being an efficiency expert or an oil industry scientist—sometimes there are parts of your job that you feel a little guilty about.

Watching filmmaker Jesse Rosten’s parody infomercial, “Fotoshop,” drives this point home pretty hard, especially as someone who thinks and writes about beauty for a living. After all, we recommend products and solutions for beauty “problems” and we publish images of celebrities looking perfect. Sometimes we even do a bit of Photoshopping to make not-so-great pictures look better.

It’s an icky fact of life that advertising sometimes lies. Beauty products don’t always live up to their claims. Magazines sometimes print things that serve their interests (or their advertisers’) more than their readers’. But while we can’t control what other websites and magazines do, we like to think that we do things differently here at DivineCaroline. When you read a story about how I tried a tooth whitener, you should know that I really did sit there for thirty-two minutes a day like a housekeeping robot. Those images are real, although I did use Photoshop to blur out the background so you couldn’t tell how messy my house was. When you see that I’m recommending a nail polish, I really was wearing that exact polish when I recommended it.

We aim to make you laugh, make you think, and to make your life better, easier, and more fun. We don’t blow smoke up your ass. We’ll never tell you we loved something when we didn’t, we’ll never tell you that any cream can make stretch marks go away (because it won’t), and when you read that we liked a product or recommend a skincare tip, it’s because we really believe what we’re saying. Even on our beauty page, we try to always remind readers that the best way to stay gorgeous is by drinking water and wearing sunscreen, not by buying a pricy potion. What’s more, we’ll never retouch a picture of a celeb and tell you that some pricy potion is responsible for her perfection.

And if there ever is a product that features “pro-pixel intensifying fauxtanical hydrojargon microbead extract infused with nutritive volumizing technology,” we’ll give a try and let you know what we really think.