I suppose everyone today knows that celebrities, actors and actresses turn to beauty magic tricks such as plastic surgery and Botox. They were already in use even when the public didn’t know about it. We all know too, sometimes because of how disastrous the results are, about the Photoshop retouching that practically every photograph goes through.
Some actresses say they keep in shape thanks to a miracle diet that sometimes borders on the dangerous. But that smooth skin, the absence of dark circles or blemishes, the dazzling white teeth, the slim, toned bodies, not a single wrinkle or stretch mark… who wouldn’t like to look like those film stars? And that is where one of the most profitable businesses in the world comes from: the beauty industry.
But this industry whets the appetite with a false illusion, because whatever you do, you will never get the results of the actress or actor you are looking at.
For more than a decade, Hollywood has used a technique that every film star has started to use and that has been kept secret until now
As you might expect, advances in software and other technologies have created a new industry within “beauty work”, in which a team of specialists can completely change your appearance through a digital procedure, using highly specialised software.
And we’re not talking about simple colour filters. Working from a few shots, they can show you throughout the whole film slimmer, heavier or more muscular, with a thinner face or fuller lips, with your gaze corrected, your hair restored, and dental and skin treatment applied. It’s what is known as “digital surgery”.
Several industry experts spoke anonymously to the website Mashable, revealing some of the secrets the general public had not known about until now. They spoke anonymously because of their confidentiality agreements, which include one very basic rule: “never talk about beauty work or digital surgery”.
Practically every Hollywood star passes through these specialists’ offices and sits for whole days of long sessions of analysis and digital retouching. They undress for a scanner that captures every pore and hair follicle, creating a template for the later beauty work, which will go completely unnoticed by the human eye.
Beauty work consists of putting yourself at the service of the actor or actress in question and getting rid of every possible flaw. These professionals point out that many women, above all, spend large sums of money trying to look like an actress who has more flaws than the person trying to look like her. Because the actress isn’t real; sometimes she doesn’t even resemble what we see in the film.
In some cases actors do it out of pure vanity; in others, because the role requires it
“When a 26-year-old actress has to play a teenager experimenting with heroin, this process is necessary,” says one of the experts.
Nobody looks in person like what you see in the films. Today, every actor is altered. That is the claim of Claus Hansen, one of the pioneers of beauty work, who now runs his own video retouching business.
Hansen agreed to tell Mashable about the danger of these procedures, which lead young people to idolise film, television and music stars without realising that everything they see is smoke and mirrors.
According to Mashable, after dozens of evasions and refusals in its attempts to get someone to talk about this secret Hollywood industry (which would be a horror for the film stars), it finally found a leak in the secret of digital surgery. And not only from specialists in the industry, but also from some actors who admitted that beauty work exists, though on condition of anonymity.
Hollywood found a way to turn back the clock
The technique made its public debut in the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008, in which the woman grows older alongside a Brad Pitt who keeps getting younger.
Brad Pitt looked radiant, appearing to be about 20 when he was already past 40 and was considered the sexiest man alive.
Of course, the technique used for Benjamin Button was already being used in the film industry long before, in a way that the human eye could never spot, not even by searching for it deliberately.
But it was a truly expensive technique, available only to Hollywood’s wealthiest and most important actors and actresses. In fact, it was the actors themselves who paid out of their own pockets to take advantage of digital surgery. Later, film directors began including those hundreds of thousands of dollars in their film budgets so that their leads would look radiant: if they look radiant, they feel more confident, and so they give a better performance; the audience likes them more, too.
The public wants to look like the actors
What’s more, the audience likes them so much that they will want to look like those actors: to have their abs, their smooth faces, their lack of love handles, their non-existent stretch marks… And that is where an industry worth billions around the world comes into play, not forgetting the business of miracle diets that the actors themselves sell you even though they know those diets didn’t work for them. In fact, they probably haven’t even tried them.
These specialists say the list of improvements film stars ask them for is immense, from women and men alike; men even more so. And the work they can do on them is unimaginable.
So if you were stunned by Jennifer Aniston’s body in her famous strip-tease scene at 45, you should know that you only saw a mirage, because that body looked about as much like Aniston’s as a cartoon does.
When you see that muscular actor with perfect abs, remember that behind him there isn’t a great personal trainer but 48 hours of digital retouching to show him to you on screen. Naturally, this has created great fitness gurus, since they are the celebrities’ trainers, when in reality they won’t do the same work with an ordinary person, because they didn’t do it with the celebrity in question either; at least not in the way you see on screen.
To get an idea of how incredible the results of this kind of software are, just watch Leonardo DiCaprio again in The Wolf of Wall Street, where he played Jordan Belfort at the ages of 24 and 26. As you could see, DiCaprio, at 40, looked those 24 years.
In short, my message, aimed above all at women who are unhappy with their bodies, is to think about this: “When you envy an actress’s face and body, remember that she would probably envy you if she knew you, because you are real, while she is only an optical illusion.”
Watch: Happy people don’t consume: harsh words from an advertising executive
Featured image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
