"reverse retouching" another woty candidate?

James Harbeck jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA
Fri Aug 24 03:10:29 UTC 2012


Very interesting for what it shows about the assumptions that have come to surround retouching, at least in the fashion world. Any modification of a photo would, in my mind, be simply retouching, and undoing that to return to the original image would be reverse retouching, but in the world of magazines it seems that retouching is so almost-universally done to make models look thinner that making them look fatter must be a reverse of it. I suspect that also the implication is that retouching is an improvement, and anything that adds weight is not an improvement. A semantic narrowing and/or shift -- how widespread, I wonder?

James Harbeck.

On 2012-08-22, at 11:34 AM, David Barnhart wrote:

> "Called "reverse retouching," this practice first came under scrutiny in
> 2010 when Jane Druker, the editor of Healthy magazine in England, admitted
> that the cover girl arrived at the shoot looking "really thin and unwell."
>
>
> <http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/08/21/fashion-magazines-now-airbr
> ushing-models-to-make-them-look-fatter/?cmpid=GoogleNewsEditorsPicks&google_
> editors_picks=true#ixzz24HIC6luQ>
> http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/08/21/fashion-magazines-now-airbru
> shing-models-to-make-them-look-fatter/?cmpid=GoogleNewsEditorsPicks&google_e
> ditors_picks=true#ixzz24HIC6luQ
>
>
>
> in contrast to Katie Couric's 2006 retouching:
> http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,1484008,00.html
>
>
>
> Hollis
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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