“We had to schedule a number of sessions with one actress who came in after the work was all done to evaluate how she looked — and this was after all of her agents, her manager, studio people all blessed it to say we're good to go or not good to go,” the former studio executive said.

“If you have an actress who’s had a long weekend, it can be quite a process. We're all humans; we all have too much to eat too much to drink sometimes, and once the tools became available, you bet they started being used.”

But artificial beauty is as old as the moving image, and the lore runs deep. Rita Hayworth’s career took off after a studio executive suggested a pioneering (but painful) method called electrolysis to raise her “ethnic” hairline. Marlene Dietrich gave herself a facelift of sorts by pulling her hair and skin back with pins and tape. Marilyn Monroe essentially invented lip gloss and sewed buttons into her bras for a pert nipple effect. Jennifer Grey’s identity-altering rhinoplasty defied the always-deny-it plastic surgery boom of the early 1990s.

All were done at a time when lighting and the soft glow of standard definition were there to wash out the tiny imperfections that make us look … human. As 4K high-definition standards hit cinemas and TVs, those tiny imperfections can be glaring.

Despite the harsh glare of HD, a number of younger actors, such as Keira Knightley and Lena Dunham, have gone out of their way to pose without makeup or retouching. It's their way of protesting what they consider to be excessive beauty standards — something that this technology facilitates.

Hansen said he’s been in many sessions with actors who point out features they don’t like, from little things like flyaway hairs to folds of skin under the arm to complete dissatisfaction with the entire body, in which case, “We have taken actresses’ faces and put them on more muscular bodies … that happens all the time.”

“They look at it like, ‘This is an image that we need to make more appealing,’” he said. “It’s an industry like anything else, and people should want to look amazing. They of course have a spark and something special — they already have an aura around them.”

But just like everything in Hollywood, you run into your share of divas.

“When you do beauty for top-ranked celebrities, it can be a hassle,” he said. “Everybody has to put their finger on it before the actual celebrity sees it. You can work around in loops for several days, and when it finally gets back to the celebrity, they’re like — I actually like Version One.”