‘That slickness just makes you incredibly insecure’ | Columns & Opinion

Frons

“My most used profile photo, also here on VROUW, is one with a filter. I still remember the day it was made. I was tired, but had an extremely good hair day. “Can you smooth out my frown?” I asked the photographer. He promised. The result was astonishing. He had filtered not only my frown, but also my whole face.”

New truth

“Where I am normally quite critical of the aging process that continues to rampage on my head, I now took this photo for the new truth: this was just me! Immediately I changed my photo on Twitter and Facebook; so that the whole follow knew that with my 44 I dried up pretty okay. My 17 year old daughter ended my dream. “It’s not you in that picture Mom.”

unnaturalness

“Suddenly I didn’t like her honesty so much anymore. Thank God she continued, “And you don’t need this at all.” But that photo is still everywhere, because turning the whole thing back is a thing I notice. photoshop; why is that even there? You rarely get away with it unseen, because let’s be honest: the unnaturalness splashes off the screen.”

Real life

“You pretend to be more beautiful than you are, which in turn causes the viewer to have to object. Also a photoshopped photo. And so we all bring versions of ourselves that are increasingly removed from reality. I’ve interviewed countless women whom I’d only seen on social media before seeing them in real life. ‘Oh, so this is what you look like in real life’, I would think, when I met them. Well, and since I’ve been using that taut profile picture, they must have thought the same of me.”

Sad

“We are all becoming more and more insecure about what is normal, it seems. You can hardly get them much slimmer than Nikkie Plessen and yet she found it necessary to adjust her legs a bit. What signal do you send with that? How embarrassing is it that I have to hear from my 17-year-old daughter that I’m fun enough without a filter? Cosmetic procedures are becoming more and more common, leaving photoshopping is no longer an issue: of course you make yourself a bit more beautiful than in real life. It’s pretty sad, isn’t it?”

Oma

“I still think about my grandmother so often. ‘What would he have made of this’, I think. She passed away before the social media frenzy started and I don’t think I could have ever explained it to her. “I made myself ten years younger with a program on the computer, Grandma.” Or: “She has had her lips filled so that she has the same mouth as all her friends.” My grandma would just look at me wide-eyed and shrug her shoulders in bewilderment. She had been right. We do not.”

Get rid of it

“Nikkie Plessen trivializes her story by laughingly stating that she is not very good at PhotoShop and I buy off my distorted photo with the explanation in this column and we go back to the order of the day. But really, we should all decide never to use that retarded program again. Gone filters, gone shopping, gone unrealistic image. That would help each other enormously, because it just makes you incredibly insecure, all that slickness with someone else and with yourself.”

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