For That Photoshopped Look: Airbrush Yourself at Home

As if the fake beauty of those Photoshopped magazine covers wasn’t enough, enter Temptu, a home “airbrush system” that can give anyone that flat, plastic look in the flesh. Chloe Angyal is appalled. One really needs to focus in order “to think about just how incredibly screwed up this concept is,” she writes. It’s not like we don’t know what happens on magazine covers—“Women have never been more media-literate”—but they still want a home airbrush?

"Promising the kind of 'perfection' once only possible through post-production digital enhancement, Temptu represents a rather depressing internalization of, and aspiration to, the plastic and poreless airbrushed look," Angyal writes. "Apparently, if you're told often enough that something is beautiful, eventually you'll believe it—even if that something doesn't look altogether natural, or even human." (More airbrush stories.)