Impossibly Beautiful

Shaker LibraryPrincess sent me a heads-up about this post at Gawker, about the discovery of an unretouched picture of Complex magazine's latest cover model, Kim Kardashian. I'm guessing no one will be surprised that, despite the fact Kardashian is famously curvy, she was still "too curvy" for publication—not to mention too dark-skinned and too "human-looking" with all her leg veins and everything.


Just a quick reminder about the nature and purpose of this series: It's called "Impossibly Beautiful" because it's meant to illustrate how no one can ever be beautiful enough, that no matter what you look like subtle "perfecting" would be done to your picture by an industry whose continued survival is contingent upon women (mostly, although they're coming for you, too, men) feeling never good enough.

And, to that end, comments that try to suss out what changes, exactly, were made, and even comments noting that, for example, the removal of laugh lines because they are ZOMG wrinkles actually robs a face of its character or humanity, are welcome. But lately many of these threads have turned into discussions of how "she looks prettier/hotter/better in the candid picture" and associated commentary that would certainly make me feel like shit if I were the person being discussed. So I really want to discourage that sort of thing and reboot this series back to its original intent, implicit in which is the question: If no one can ever be beautiful enough, then to what end is the pursuit of an elusive perfection?

[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, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Nine.]