Airbrushing meets the #MeToo Movement

The left photo, retouched, is from a previous CVS beauty campaign. The unaltered image at right shows how the company plans to represent beauty.

Well it’s about time. Now, if only every other company would do the same!

This week, CVS, the American pharmaceutical giant, has pledged to stop “materially altering” all of the imagery associated with its beauty products — in stores, on its website and on social media. Starting in April, the photographs women see when they go to buy a CVS brand will not have been so smoothed, color-corrected or otherwise remastered as to produce overwhelming insecurity in the shopper.

“It was really a response to the bigger conversation women are having over their own level of empowerment in society,” said Helena Foulkes, President of CVS Pharmacy & Executive VP of CVS Health.

To not, in other words, be complicit in sending a message to shoppers about not being good enough by showing them photographs of women they should aspire to be, knowing that such aspiration is actually impossible because even the women in the photos don’t look like they do in the photos.

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