Delusions in the check-out line

A babe, a bad-ass, and two nerds, all immaculately brushed up.

The worst part of an excruciatingly long line at Wally-World (Wal-Mart) is being trapped between an old lady contesting her coupons and a hulking lummox that refuses to let you out of the line. While in this predicament, one's eye may wander from candy and batteries to the conveniently placed flasks and beef jerky, finally coming to rest on a magazine cover with some immaculately tanned blond prancing around in a scant bikini. You may have two thoughts here, wow she's perfect! or, photo shop can do some pretty amazing things these days. I find myself thinking the latter, air brushing and photo touch up on magazines covers is on the rise. It makes sense from a marketing stand point, everyone wants to keep up with the Jones' and people are intensely concerned with looking good. Diet and weight are fast becoming major concerns for many Americans and seeing magazines that have sexy "real" people promising cover like results with just ten minutes of exercise just seem to fuel people's delusions and make them eager to part with their money. Not everyone falls for this but for some this can result in extremely unhealthy choices, such as, excessive plastic surgeries, and even binge eating or purging to look "good". Airbrushing is not limited to just people and sex appeal, cooking magazines utilize wax food stand ins for their cover shots, luring us in with our stomachs. Call me a hippie (no really, I don't mind), but I find differences and flaws are what make us human. I'm rather glad I don't look like every tool-bag I see on the cover of some fitness or style magazine, I'd much rather stay humble and not have to worry so much about my image being up to par with what editors and photographers think is good.  I find it hard to believe that everyone appearing on a magazine cover has the exact same intensity of tan or some immaculate god or goddess like body, it just insults intelligence to suggest this, but it still continues to occur. This is not to say that I find all photographic manipulation to be a bad thing, could you imagine having an embarrassing cold sore on the day of your cover shoot? Next thing you know that picture is plastered all over the internet causing some to speculate you may have herpes. I find wide scale airbrushing and photo-shopping is just to unimaginative and cheap, who hasn't used sex appeal to play with our emotions and get us to buy things? I can only hope that society gets wise to the delusions created by airbrushing, people may actually find they like being themselves better than chasing a photo-shop  pipe dream.

Kieth Richards still looks like a skeleton despite airbrushing, he's chased one to many pipe dreams.