That may sound like an impossible assignment, but that's exactly what Perceptions of Perfection, a project launched by content marketing agency Fractl, asked female graphic artists around the world to do. In order to see how different cultures view female beauty, they sent a full-body image of a woman posing in her underwear and asked them to photoshop her to look ideal according to the standards of their country.
Widely held perceptions of beauty and perfection can have a deep and lasting cultural impact on women. The goal of this project is to better understand potentially unrealistic standards of beauty and to see how such pressures vary around the world.
This is the original image.
Below are the resulting images.
China and Italy offered the most surprising transformations, with the woman being slimmed down to cartoonish proportions—an estimated body weight that the researchers noted would likely be anorexic (which is an eating disorder characterized by a low weight, fear of gaining weight, a strong desire to be thin and food restriction. Many people with anorexia see themselves as overweight even though they are underweight.) in real life.
Not everyone wanted the woman to be stick thin. However, Spain still shrunk her down but only slightly, giving her a figure the researchers estimate would have been in the overweight BMI range in real life.
The U.S. kept her wider hips but gave her a nipped-in waist and serious thigh gap.
As you can see, the designers’ changes made some of these images almost unrecognisable compared with the original photo. While some remained largely similar with the exception of slight slimming, others resemble a new woman altogether. Drastic changes in hair colour, clothe, and waist-to-hip ratio were common. Some designers produced an exaggerated hourglass figure; other nations chose to render her so thin that her estimated BMI, according to a survey they conducted, would fall under or dangerously close to 17.5. According to the NHS, “Adults with anorexia generally have a BMI below 17.5.”