14 DAY TRIAL // Except for a few months in 2011 when she gained some weight because, as per her own words, she stopped working out and overindulged in fast food, Paris Hilton has always been on the thin / lean side. Judging from her most recent Instagram shots, she could do with losing a bit more weight.
The former reality star turned businesswoman and relatively successful DJ has turned to Photoshopping her own photos on social media, but to her great misfortune, she didn’t get away with it because her fans noticed.
It would probably not be such a huge thing if she removed blemishes or added a filter to make herself look better (because, after all, don’t we all do these things?), but Paris actually retouched her pics to make herself appear thinner.
In one particular photo, the one embedded below, she basically gave herself the same kind of impossible proportions found on Human Barbie Valeria Lukyanova, what with the tiny waist and the slender hips. However, you can notice she’s sporting a much slimmer waistline in the photo above as well.
She would have probably gotten away with it if she weren’t surrounded by paparazzi 24/7, which means photos of how she really looked on the day she took the offending snap have already emerged online. The Daily Mail has those paparazzi photos, and you can see the difference for yourself: Paris is in excellent shape and she’s very slender, but she does not have the tiny waist she gave herself on social media.
Not that she would be the only celebrity to try and pull a stunt like this on her fans: Kim Kardashian does it all the time and has already been called out on it several times. Even former Victoria’s Secret Angel Miranda Kerr was once caught posting a Photoshopped photo of herself, in which her waistline and hips had been brought down a couple of sizes.
Even Beyonce has been accused of slimming herself down in Photoshop to include the much-desired “thigh gap,” which she doesn’t have in real life.
Still, that doesn’t change the fact that this procedure is incredibly damaging to these women’s younger fans, who believe that what they see in social media is unfiltered reality or, if not, filtered reality (because those Instagram filters are favorites with everyone) but not retouched.
It’s enough that we have heavily retouched photos in all media, from magazines to TV ads, to send a wrong message on body image to young women and girls.
If celebrities start retouching their “selfies” on a regular basis but still try to push them as “real” representations of their body, the same young women and girls, these celebrities’ fans, will end up with a completely skewed sense of healthy body image.