If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that last Friday night I was inspired by the beautiful Pigletish to give retouching apps a try.

I wanted to do this to see how easy it can be to completely alter your face and enhance your beauty. I knew these apps existed, but I wanted to see how accessible and easy they are to find and use.

I have never used one of these before. Granted, I use Instagram filters, which adjust the brightness, contrast, etc. but I have never retouched an image before.

So I headed over to the good’ol Google Play store and typed in ‘face editor.’

The first thing that struck me was just how many different options there were! Facetune, BodyEditor – even one called ‘Perfect Me!’ There were so many, most of which were completely free to download and use. They all generally had really positive reviews, including people saying they’d edited their bodies to their ideal as motivation to shrink themselves down. That breaks my heart.

I eventually went for ‘AirBrush’, an app with over 10 million users and an average rating of 4.8 (out of 5).

When you load the App it brings up a nice little tutorial which runs you through some of the key features. It even offers you stock photos of models to practice on. I threw myself straight in and uploaded a recent selfie I’d taken. From here I was offered a range of free features, including changing my make-up, hair, removing acne, smoothing my skin and even relighting the photo.

I chose to focus on the ‘sculpt’ section. This allows you to quite literally tweak every feature of your face. I thinned my face, made my nose smaller (it gives you options to alter the tip, bridge or both, and you can even make your nose longer!). I made my eyes bigger and angled them more before increasing the size of my upper and lower lips. I reduced my chin and reshaped my eyebrows and boom…(original on the right)

The thing that struck me most about these images was how subtle the difference is. The app contains a button to flip from the original to the retouched one and until you do this (or place them side by side) it’s hard to tell the difference.

The difference each little tweak made is very subtle, despite me pushing the scales as far along as they go for each altered feature. I reckon if I placed this image on my social media (without the original) I would be inundated with comments but few people would be able to tell it had been quite heavily edited.

Shockingly, creating this image took moments! Way under 5 minutes. Sliding a few scales left or right changed my entire face in seconds. I could download it easily, ready to share with the world.

So I tried with a few more. I even tried my recent ‘make up free selfie’ to see if I could alter an image where there was seemingly nowhere to hide.

In each of these the original is on the right. The key things I did to each was make my face thinner, nose smaller and my lips and eyes bigger.

This little exercise taught me a lot!

Firstly it’s scary, right? Even looking at some of them myself I had to look closely to see the differences. With each image I made sure I spent no longer than 5 minutes on each. The subtly of the impact was the thing that struck me the most.

Doing this also made me consider my friends who I always think look amazing in their pics and whether or not they were sneakily using these apps to alter themselves. I knew celebs did it but I had no idea it was so easy and accessible to do. A free app and 5 mins is all it takes! Even a ‘make up free’ image can be enhanced without you ever knowing!

Doing this also taught me how addictive this could be, even though I went into this with a view to call out these apps it did make me consider whether I could continue to use these apps and ‘get away with it’ – of course I’m not going to, I’m all about real beauty! But I felt like I looked better and wanted to portray myself as more beautiful than I am. At one point I even fleetingly thought about lip fillers! Like, what the hell!? I never thought of this as something I needed before and am completely against unnecessary surgery/procedures (for myself, if you’re into it, that’s fine!) yet an evening on this app made me think it wouldn’t even be such a big deal!

I was also shocked how professional the images were. I was expecting obvious warps or gaps where things had been edited to look smaller or larger but this wasn’t the case. There were no wobbly walls or unexplainable gaps like some of the Kardashian fails, and everything still seems in proportion!

It makes me sad to think of all the young girls and boys using these apps, changing their faces, bodies etc. and being left feeling that the true them will never be quite good enough. Even at 25 and reasonably body confident this app made me question my appearance and getting surgery, so I can’t imagine how much this impacts on young people!

It also made me realise we need to call BS on these apps. I remember reading that France have to declare when images have been edited in magazines and online and I firmly support us following suit. I never realised how exposed to altered images we might really be, and the message this is subtly sending us about our own beauty. It has to stop. We need to set realistic beauty standards and embrace the realities of our bodies, skin and lip size!

I uninstalled the app late on Friday evening and all day Saturday was itching to play around more. But now, a week on, I feel free of it and never want to go on such an app again. But I’m pleased I’m a little wiser to these apps, and just how easy it is to alter yourself now and I’ll certainly be looking twice at people’s pictures – you have been warned!

Lorna

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