Virtually Perfect: Image Retouching and Adolescent Body Image

Abstract

Most studies of ideal-body media effects on body image focus on the extreme thinness of the models, not their idealness. In modern media, this idealness is often created or maximized via digital image editing. This experiment tested the effects of image editing outside the research-typical context of exclusive thinness. Original unretouched photographs were manipulated by a professional retoucher to produce unretouched and retouched image conditions. In a third condition (retouched-aware), the retouched images were explicitly labeled as retouched. Adolescents ( N = 393, average age 15.43) were randomly assigned to one of these conditions or a no-exposure control, and they completed a questionnaire following exposure. Objectified body consciousness increased and physical self-esteem decreased among male and female adolescents in the retouched-aware condition only. This boomerang effect of retouching awareness is explored in the discussion.

NOTES

FUNDING

This research was supported by a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation.

Notes

1. The decisions made by the image editor reflected both his personal assumptions about physical attractiveness and, more broadly, his knowledge of what makes an image marketable in U.S. media. The changes he made to the images were not in the service of some essentially attractive ideal, but in the service of what his expertise taught him will sell in modern media and what U.S. consumers of visual media seem to prefer based on the contract-booking success of the models whose portfolios he has retouched.

2. The sample images represent the female and male photographic subjects with the greatest degree of body-shape alteration in the booklets. None of the other subjects had as much hourglass-shape enhancement as the sample female or V-taper enhancement as the sample male, but they were all subtly enhanced in a similar way. The image editor verified that this type of enhancement is universal in model portfolio retouching. Thus, it may be impossible to apply an ecologically valid retouching manipulation that is 100% independent of thinness since the hourglass and V-taper shapes have slightly narrowed waists relative to shoulders. However, the final photographs still featured a range of body sizes (some significantly heavier than those shown here), so the stimuli for this study still represent appearance ideals well outside the context of exclusive thinness.

3. In exploratory ANCOVAs, age (dichotomized at the median); race (White vs. a second group composed of African Americans, Latinas and Latinos, and other racial designations); and BMI (dichotomized at the median) were tested as potential moderators of the retouching manipulation. None interacted significantly with the retouching manipulation, so they were retained as covariates (with age and BMI in non-dichotomized, continuous form) on the basis of significant zero-order correlations with the dependent variables. Specifically, physical self-esteem and Whiteness were negatively correlated for girls, r = −.21, p < .001, as were physical self-esteem and BMI for both girls, r = −.25, p < .001, and boys, r = −.36, p < .001. There were no significant correlations between objectified body consciousness and age, race, or BMI. In the ANCOVAs constructed to test the hypotheses, none of the covariates significantly predicted objectified body consciousness, although all three predicted physical self-esteem: BMI, F(1, 317) = 31.26, p < .001, η² = .09; race, F(1, 317) = 31.26, p < .001, η² = .09; and age, F(1, 317) = 5.35, p < .05, η² = .02.