How Photoshop makes you feel like you have bad skin
(HT: The recently not-fired-by-Edwards Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon.) Never trust any image you see in the mass media. Calibrate your expectations looking at real people or your head is going to get severely messed up. I suspect that this is very difficult to do in practice, as we don't have conscious access to the mechanisms that set our expectations about what skin should look like. Those mechanisms evolved in a time when the images of people we saw tended to be actual people. But we can at least look at before-and-after sets like these to remind ourselves that what is out there is a fantasy.
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