A recent Oil of Olay ad featuring the model Twiggy stirred some controversy that has led Britain to take steps to make ads that are Photoshopped illegal, specifically those targeted to girls under the age of 16. They feel as though these ads are giving young girls unrealistic expectations about their appearance and can lead to depression, eating disorders and low self-esteem.

How much Photoshop is too much? Will this be an all or nothing scenario? Are ads targeted to 17 year olds perfectly legal? Will we be taking the artistic freedom away from designers by telling them what they are allowed to design or is this social responsibility? It seems like this will be a very fine line to dance on, plenty of gray area for controversy.

I am a little torn on this issue – I mean, in the end, isn’t the whole strategy behind advertising to make you feel as though you cannot live without a certain product? So by making you feel inferior, wouldn’t you be more likely to buy that face creme that promises youth, thus making the ad successful? I do believe that we shouldn’t be targeting young girls with these tactics – but advertising isn’t the only one saturating the world with these images and ideals of the perfect woman – will banning Photoshop be enough? Maybe we should start by giving Barbie realistic measurements and a beat up Corolla to drive.

Food stylists use all sort of tricks to make food look better for the purposes of advertising. Isn’t that basically the same thing? Maybe they should ban this next because depicting all food as perfect and delicious makes people want more, in turn contributing to childhood obesity. If they showed a fast food hamburger in actual form, would anyone buy one? I wouldn’t. (But then again I don’t anyways because I know what they really look and taste like. And I know that what I see on TV isn’t going to be what I get in my bag.)

While I believe that Photoshopping ads to falsely augment the effects of a product is not only false advertising but ethically wrong, should falsely “portraying” a celebrity on the cover of a magazine be a crime? I think in today’s culture most people operate under the assumption that all images in the media have had the heck airbrushed out of them. I know I do, and I consider picking out all the really, really bad Photoshop jobs a bit of a hobby. Rubber stamp tool gone wrong – that’s some good stuff.

Since Photoshop is such an integral part of my professional livelihood, albeit not to airbrush models to look younger, less wrinkled and wafer thin, it’s tough for me to know where this line should be drawn – if at all. I have posed a lot of questions here that I just don’t have the answers to and maybe I am just playing devil’s advocate, but it would be interesting to get the view from those people that don’t have a bias stake in this argument.