The above title may sound like an ad you’d find in the back pages of a comic book or pinned to a corkboard at your local Laundromat. But it’s true folks: There’s a way to lose up to 15 pounds for only a buck … in your selfies, that is.
Robin Phillips and Susan Green, who run a company called Pretty Smart Women, came up with this new selfie app called SkinneePix that gives users the power to slim down the look of their smiling mugs by five, 10 or 15 pounds with the hit of a button.
Apparently, the ladies were taking a vacation with some friends last summer and found themselves totally bummed out with all of the selfies they took during the trip. So they found some technical help, came up with a realistic-looking picture-shaping formula and put out this 99-cent app with the descriptor, “SkinneePix makes your photos look good and helps you feel good. It’s not complicated. No one needs to know. It’s our little secret.”
Now on the, uh, face of things, that doesn’t sound all that bad. There are some people out there who love looking at themselves (a lot) and enjoy what they see, and there are those who don’t particularly. So why not create a little technical magic to help out those who are less satisfied?
But let’s think about that and the world around us a bit.
First of all, this app essentially boils down to being an instant dose of Photoshop. And, well, don’t we already live in a society that’s Photoshopped to the hilt? There are questions being asked about how unrealistic images in everything from fashion mags to toothpaste ads are serving as contributors to adolescent health problems—eating disorders, body image pathology, you name it. And it seems to me that instantly Photoshopping our selfies could be tossing a bit more fuel on that the poor self-image fire. You feeling a little chunky? Don’t worry, there’s an app for that.
Now, Ms. Phillips and Ms. Green have said that they actually want the app to help motivate users to really get active and trim down. “When I took 15 pounds off I was astounded,” Green wrote in a SkinneePix blog post. “Not only was it a small amount of ‘weight,’ but I found that I felt like I looked better. And I thought to myself, hey, ‘I could lose 15 pounds and look like that, not such a big deal.'”
But does that logic fly? I mean, there’s always something we mere mortals would like better about ourselves, or habits we’d like to adjust, but just how does a “skinny up your image” app do that? It feels like it’s really not doing a whole lot more than reinforcing our culture’s “the thinner you are, the better,” celebutant-focused beauty standard. And for me, that’s a real issue.
I saw an article not long ago that talked about a 19-year-old kid in England named Danny Bowman who became so obsessed with the idea of a “perfect” selfie that he would spend 10 hours and take 200 selfies a day in an effort to reach that goal. That compulsion eventually drove him to the brink of suicide.
Sure, that’s just one anecdotal story about one kid you don’t know, but it’s probably not so outrageously “out there” as it may seem. An msn.com article recently reported that, “In the US, one in three cosmetic surgeons has seen a recent marked increase in the number of patients under 30 asking for facial procedures—such as nose jobs and eyelid surgery—so they can look better in online photographs.”
Here’s one more quote I’d like to offer up on the topic from a beautyredifined.net article. “Selfies aren’t inherently evil. And taking 55 pictures of your own face at slightly different angles with varying expressions is not fundamentally wrong. BUT (you knew that was coming) … when we put this female-driven phenomenon in the context of the culture in which we live, selfies aren’t just a trivial trend or a form of self-expression.” Those little snapshots become what this article labels as self-objectification.
Add it all up and none of this feels like a pretty picture—with or without a skinny app.
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