Beauty Photography - Selfies Dove Campaign: Beauty Is #beautyis

I love how portrait photography has the power to help women feel more confident and realize how beautiful they are. These days, DOVE is coming up with awesome Beauty Self Esteem Campaigns. This is one of their most recent videos that I stumbled upon the other day. I take selfies all the time and more often than not, I end up taking 20 pictures just to get that one that I really like. How picky we are!! I'm a big fan of the selfie in the mirror haha because I can actually see what I'm taking a picture of. Today, at lunchtime I went into the bathroom mirror and snapped away on my iPhone until I created an excessive collection of beautiful me-photos. I've added a fun filter but I didn't do any retouching - not that I need it ;) You can check out my selfie photo shoot below. Geeze we're a strange generation haha. Check out the video and go snap your own selfie my friends!

And of course, I can never resist a good retouching session so I let my crazy retouching skills loose on my own selfie. I'll admit it is very fun to see all the changes I can make in Photoshop - totally transforming my appearance into something totally different. In the retouched photo, I just did the stereotypical magazine types of retouching — smoothing skin, enlarging eyes, slimming face, lengthening limbs, slimming waist, etc.... I was totally happy with the way I looked in the originally and although I admit it would be nice to shed a few pounds, even after seeing the overly-retouched me, I'm still feeling very content with the original version...thankfully.

Strange though... at first, the retouched one looked so unnatural to me - maybe that's just because I'm not used to seeing myself so "lean"! But then.... the more I stared at it, something in my mind started to change. After writing this blog post, I thought the retouched picture definitely looked better. It was an adjustment - like how we've all adjusted to seeing supermodels in magazines as a "normal" body. At first I thought I looked too skinny in the retouched photo but only 5 minutes later and I'd adjusting to thinking that version looked more normal and better!

Of course, there is a part of me that wants to look like the retouched image because it reminds me of what I'd see in magazines / TV. But that's just the insecure part of me that wants to look different and lose weight and be admired by all. I have to keep reminding myself that at first glance, the first time I saw the retouched photo, my first thought was "I look like I'm sucking it all in." LOL :P What a joke! Media imagery is so messed up!

Share your selfie and hashtag #beautyis!