Less than a week after an unretouched photo of Cindy Crawford leaked onto the Web, a set of untouched photos from an ad shoot featuring Beyonce has emerged as well. Just like with the Crawford photo, the new images are causing quite a discussion online about the role Photoshop has in creating perfection for advertisements.
The set of photos were leaked by the website TheBeyoncéWorld yesterday, and reportedly were captured during a L’Oréal commercial and ad shoot back in 2013. Beyonce, who works as a spokeswoman for the cosmetic brand, is seen with wrinkles and imperfections on her skin.
For Beyoncé, though, the stakes are even higher. For her, the exposure is not simply a matter of mandated versus not, Shopped versus not; it is also a matter, on some level, of human versus not. Beyoncé is on the one hand a person, with a last name—Knowles—and a husband and a daughter and a sister who gets angry sometimes. She has been pregnant and depressed and embarrassed and, we can safely assume, on the receiving end of at least one bad hair day. But Beyoncé is on the other hand a Celebrity, and a Star, and a Cultural Figure, and all this comes with certain obligations. Porelessness is one of them. So is a kind of generalized cultivation of the particular strain of feminine perfection we shorthand as “fierceness.” As an entrepreneur who is explicitly selling us music and clothing and diets and lifestyles, but who is implicitly selling us herself, Beyoncé has a business interest in her own transcendence. She is the person who gave us “Flawless,” which is a song but also a statement. Beyoncé is figuring out how to be human and famous at the same time.
Given all that, the extremely indignant reaction to those supposedly un-retouched L’Oreal photos is extremely unsurprising. We want, fully understanding how ridiculous it is to want it, to believe in Beyoncé’s perfection. We want to believe that she really looks like that. We want to believe that she really is like that, all around—talented, beautiful, classy, successful, in love—because if Beyoncé can have it all in the way she has opted to have it all, perhaps there is a sliver of hope for the rest of us.
