Darren Levin: Parents are paying for school photo retouching services
It’s one thing to have a laugh about an awkward teen phase, but parents who pay to have their children’s pictures photoshopped need to have a long hard look at themselves, writes Darren Levin.
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If a DeLorean pulled up out of nowhere and you could travel back to the past what would you change?
Would you go back to 1955 and make sure Biff Tannen doesn’t take Lorraine McFly to the Enchantment Under The Sea dance? Perhaps you’d like to warn the world that the host of The Celebrity Apprentice was going to be president one day? Or maybe you’d want to knock off baby Hitler? (We’re in hypothetical mode now so please don’t @ me about the ethics of killing babies.) Personally, I’d go back to the hairdressers at a suburban shopping centre in 1995 and stop another murder: the severe undercut that ruined my Year 9 class photos.
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Every now and then I wince when I think of that photo. It wasn’t just the haircut. It was also my crooked smile, the way the harsh studio light bounced off my face, the rosy red pigment in my cheeks, my tiny tiny teeth, the scar that ran along my forehead from when I ran into a security gate aged three, my pimply skin, and the dreaded look of a young man who realised his life would never be this easy or carefree again.
This week, when I heard the news that an Arizona school is now offering a class photo retouching service, I secretly wished that sort of technology had been available back in the days of my very questionable haircut choices.
Shared on Twitter by American broadcaster and mum-of-two Sam Walker, the order form for her kids’ school photos has two retouching options. There’s the basic package, which offers removal of garden variety blemishes like Vegemite stains, playground grazes, face tattoos, erythropoietic protoporphyria, crows feet, and magpie beaks.
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Or the premium package which includes teeth whitening, skin toning, virtual dermabrasion, and a face swap with Kendall Jenner if that’s what you really wanted.
As you’d expect, the internet promptly exploded with outrage – and fair enough.
“This is appalling,” wrote one parent on Twitter. “My daughter has 9% full thickness burns and we have never attempted to hide her scars in photos. We just taught her that she is amazing as she is.”
While some bloke clearly didn’t get the point, sharing, “I think this is probably aimed at the parents.”
Given the option back in year 9 I would’ve absolutely stumped up for the premium package, but the thought of my parents asking for a retouch? There are few things more damaging than the two people obligated to love you for all your blemishes, face tattoos and flaws ticking a box that says, “Yeah, you know what? My kid is pretty great, but they’d even better with their natural skin colouring slightly dialled down on their face.”
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Then I started thinking how services like this don’t exist unless there’s demand for them in the first place. Maybe this order form was just an extension of a world fashion magazines, social media accounts, face altering apps, creepy avatars, and deep fakes. After all, can you really be outraged about a class photo retouching service when you just applied a Crema Instagram filter to a photo of your kids?
I’m as guilty as the next person of trying to reverse engineer the perfect sunset or the perfect pool shot or the perfect family portrait. But what sort of messaging is this sending to my kids?
Perhaps it’s time I started embracing #nofilter as more than a hashtag, and actually a way to live.