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Seeking to explore different national expectations of beauty, journalist Ester Honig asked 40 graphic designers from around the world to “make her beautiful.” A cool idea, especially when you note that all of these designers were of widely different skill levels and were only paid $5 to $30 for their work, so some of that work is… not what you’d expect. It raises the question: how much of what we complain about when we look at magazines is because someone is not so great at their job?

Either way, I think we can all agree on a few things: photo manipulation is harder than it looks and entirely too overused in media, and graphic designers are probably super-overworked for much too little pay. Oh, also, beauty standards suck. But that’s kind of a given for most of us.

The above gallery is just a small sample of the images that Honig compiled. You can see the rest, as well as more of her work, on her website.

(via Ester Honig)

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