Exposing Victorian Influencers Who 'Facetuned' Their Photos. (Photo Manipulation was EVERYWHERE 🤯)

Go to nordvpn.com/bernadette or use code bernadette to get a 2-year plan plus a bonus gift with a huge discount.

My grandmother's picture from when she was twenty was flawless. She looked gorgeous. I told her that once, and she said, "it's all fake, dear. I had terrible acne. They touched up the photo." 😂🤦‍♀️😍❤

There's a lot to take away from this video but the thing that is standing out to me is the realization that the term "Gibson girl" belongs in the same group as the terms "e-girl" "insta baddie" and etc

Occam's razor: well, they probably retouched their pictures Modern society: well they obviously went through surgery to remove a couple of ribs! Because that was so much easier at that time

It makes me so sad to see that freckles were seen as such an ugly thing, even until quite recently. Ever since I was little I have always found freckles to be gorgeous and I was incredibly jealous of people who had them. I hope that everyone who reads this who has freckles is proud of them and finds them beautiful!

In portraiture, they used this brilliant filter called 'I'm paying you to make me look good'

I can see how the Victorians wouldn’t consider it “cheating” to retouch photos because think about what preceded photography : painted portraits. Even today everybody assumes a painted portrait is the “kindest” interpretation of the subject. Victorians probably understood implicitly that the photograph was an idealized version of themselves.

Thank you Bernadette for this. For all of us "stout" ladies out there that look at those Edwardian outfits and say, "I'm never going to look like that" it's good to know that they didn't either!

"There is no new thing under the sun" - In my art and theatre classes we spent a whole lot of time discussing how the Greek's represented the best in people, while their successors the Romans were much more comfortable with imperfection and "ugliness." It's not that every Greek person 3000 years ago was wandering around as a LITERAL Adonis, but that the Greek artists wanted to show the beauty that the human form ~could~ achieve. Greek playwrights were very concerned about how people ~should~ behave, and the consequences if they didn't. The Romans, meanwhile, slapped crooked noses and too-close eyes onto their statues bc that's how people actually look. Their literature has way more people getting away with bad behaviour - it's played for laughs. People are people, and we like to pretend to have perfect skin. shrugs

Oh man, nothing quite like seeing how impossible the originals were to make one suddenly understand why one's own historical outfits never look quite right.

I've always assumed the lack of facial "flaws" was due to the camera's lack of ability to pick it up. I did know about the body Photoshop though. The more you know.

You missed an interesting rabbit hole: the part about "opening closed eyes' is probably there to help folks with the surprisingly popular Victorian practice of photographing their recently deceased loved ones. There were special 'stands' sold to photog studios for the sole purpose of propping up a corpse for a photo. It was popular to 'open' their eyes by retouching the photo, but it wasn't entirely uncommon to actually paint fake eyes on the eyelids of the deceased. You probably have no idea just how many Victorian photos of family groups you've seen in which one of them (often the youngest) has actually just died the day before.

I might speculate that the expectation of photos representing reality might have come from the advent of mass personal photography. I grew up looking at family photos that my parents shot with their SLRs onto film. Those photos were never altered, and I would say that this is definitely where I learned to expect photos to show reality.

Really puts into perspective that moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth’s aunt asks her if the miniature of Mr Darcy is ‘a fair likeness’. From this I assume that people were aware of some artistic liberties

My godfather was a professional photographer in the USSR, and he'd manually retouch all the negatives of portraits he took to remove blemishes etc. He was really good at it. Nowadays, he does it all in Photoshop, obviously, but he still knows how to do it and will do it for fun now and then. Retouching on negatives is a super fascinating skill.

Speaking of painting, the french painter Courbet was completely rejected at the Salon after proposing his « Les baigneuses » (meaning The bathing ladies) in 1853, which pictured a realistic naked lady with all of what would be considered flaws. Hips, belly and so on. She was called by the high society a « cow » or a « labour horse » because of course she did not correspond to the canon of that era. And Courbet was completely rejected by the « mainstream people » and is now considered one the the founders of the realist mouvement in french painting. Also, I think one painter is to be mentioned when alteration of the body is the subject : Ingres ! When you really look close at his portraits of naked people, you realise that bones are not at the right places I Love what you do ! Thanks 🥰

I genuinely appreciate that when she was talking about how obvious it is that you've retouched your shape if you're standing in front of a fence or something detailed, she demonstrated on a photo of herself instead of taking the easy approach and inserting an image mocking someone else.

Remember painted photos? My paternal grandfather told the photographer the wrong color for my grandmother's eyes. She was pissed off about that until the day she died.

Bernadette saying words like "selfie" seems almost anachronistic

As someone who is an artist who does oil paintings especially portraits of people, it always felt weird to me this hatred people feel towards "editing" and hiding one's blemishes. I am not talking about extreme cases of making ones waist look 12 cm smaller, but some of the alternative influencers I used to follow started being against any kind of editing and retouching. Which is mind blowing to me. When I make a portrait painting using someone's face as a reference, a friend or a sibling, you can bet I am not painting zits or dark shadows under their eyes. You are making that image be the representation of someone. Does the zit they had on their nose in that day represent them? No. A beauty mark they have been having on their face since forever, that is to stay and that represents them. But not temporary blemishes.