A "New" Me

A while ago, I had a picture taken with a famous person. This person is someone I admire a lot, so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to have my picture taken with him. As I've blogged before, I've always been quite photogenic. But because of getting older, my appearance in this particular photographic didn't please me. It wasn't a bad photograph, it was actually pretty good in general. I smiled nicely and my teeth and hair looked nice.

But of course the first thing I honed in on was the wrinkles which have started to appear on my face. The odd thing is, the picture didn't look like I "FEEL." I actually feel very young and happy, especially since I've been in therapy, working on my body image, and learning to accept myself. Still, lately it's always a bit of a shock when I see current photos of myself...I just think I look so OLD! I really wanted to frame this particular picture, and display it in our home, but I've put it off. I just was not happy with the photograph.

So the other day, hub asked me why I hadn't had the picture printed and framed so we could display it. I rather sheepishly told him the reason was that I felt I didn't look very good in the picture. He kind of rolled his eyes and said it was a great picture, what the heck was I worried about? Okay, that's fine for him to say that, but I wanted that picture to be PERFECT.

Lately I've signed up to follow a blog called Photoshopdisasters. It's a real hoot and they show some hilarious examples of poorly photoshopped advertisements, like the Ralph Lauren ad where they made the woman so skinny with a huge head and she looked deformed. Still, it got me to thinking…yup, you guessed it, I decided to see if I could get the photo Photoshopped! I found a website called Phoowa.com, uploaded the picture with the simple instructions "remove wrinkles and double chin from woman's face." Within one day I received a small photoshopped picture "on approval" from "Steve"...after I paid a mere $4 by Paypal, he sent me the larger version.

So here's a little glimpse of what was done...

This is the original version

This is the photoshopped version (I wish I could show you the whole picture as
it's remarkable how young I look in this version! LOL!)

When I got the photo back, not only had Steve made me look good, he had corrected some minor reddish blemishes on the famous person's face. We both looked great!

The next day I said to hub, "Do you remember that photo that I wasn't happy with?" Of course he did. So I showed him the new version and asked if he noticed anything different. He really couldn't figure out what I was talking about, which was good, because it meant it wasn't fake looking or a "photoshop disaster." So then I showed him both photos side by side and then asked him what he thought. He said "WOW~ the second picture looks like you got a facelift!" He thought it was pretty cool.

So, until I can afford a "real" facelift…for $4 I can have a temporary photo facelift whenever I want! Just having that new picture has made me excited now to get the photo printed and framed for display.

So...What do you think? Do you think I'm being superficial? I probably do need to keep working on aging gracefully and being less focused on my appearance. So please be honest...I really do want to know what you think...was this a crazy, vain thing to do?

P.S. Thank you to those who suggested how to fix my font problems. It definitely was due to the new version of Word I was using. So I typed this post in "TextEdit" and it came out really well.