They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but a recent experiment shows that eyes don’t just vary from person to person – they vary from culture to culture.

Journalist Esther Honig of Kansas City, Missouri sent an unedited image of herself to roughly 40 photoshoppers in different countries. The 24 year-old accompanied the photo with a simple request: “Make me beautiful.”

With varying degrees of skill, some artists changed her skin color while others added a face full of makeup and defined eyebrows. Others left her virtually untouched. While her face structure remained largely unaltered, some cultures saw fit to add clothing – namely Morocco, who added a hijab.

Honig’s test further elucidates the difficulty of finding a universal standard of beauty: “Photoshop allows us to achieve our unobtainable standard of beauty, but when we compare those standards on a global scale, achieving the ideal remains all the more elusive.”

Check out the interpretations of several cultures below and visit Honig’s website for more of her Before & After collection.

Bangladesh

USA

Philippines

Morocco

Argentina

Vietnam

Israel

Greece

India

Serbia

Ukraine

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