Impossibly Beautiful

I'm pretty sure that Isla Fisher (star of the upcoming crapfest Confessions of a Shopaholic) is a mermaid—because that is the only thing that explains her ability to move the lower half of her torso to one side while keeping the upper half of her torso and shoulders perfectly straight:


[Click to embiggen.]
Or Photoshop. But I'm going with mermaid.

Shaker InfamousQBert sent this in with the note: "Is it just me, or have they done bizarre things to Isla Fischer's torso and arm? …I don't understand what's going on with her waist/boob area at all." It's not just you, IQB.

Fisher is, by any reasonable standard, a thin and attractive woman. But evidently neither thin nor attractive enough for InStyle magazine, who have clearly thinned her waist to impossible proportions. And even if they were not the inconceivably ridiculous proportions of a Barbie doll, they are nonetheless not Isla Fisher's proportions:


At left is Fisher three weeks ago at the Golden Globes, and at right is Fisher last night at the premiere of her new film. Even in a form-fitting dress at a major event, or in a dress designed to flatter an hourglass shape as much as possible, her body simply does not look like it does on that magazine cover.

I would ask why InStyle feels the need to create a body for Isla Fisher that she does not have, when her real body is the one in which she became a much-discussed ingénue and the one in which she became popular and stylish enough to arrive on the cover of their magazine in the first place, except I already know why.

In a better world, these magazines would come with a public health warning.

[Impossibly Beautiful: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five.]