There are plenty of perks to living in the 21st century: We don't ever have to listen to another voice mail, because texts exist. Taco Bell exists. And there aren't any uggos on the covers of our magazines. Well, there aren't real people at all on the covers of our magazines, just once real people who have been airbrushed to death. Thanks, Photoshop!
"While the conversation about the media's portrayal and obsession with an unrealistic and unattainable beauty standard is not a new one, I think it's crazy how much retouching people don't notice," Take Part photo editor Lauren Wade says, noting everything from Photoshopped tummy tucks to "full-out head swapping."
"We've taken a digital liquefy brush to the painstakingly layered oils of some of the most celebrated paintings of the female form, nipping and tucking at will," she continues. "There may be something sacrilegious in that, but the same could be said for our contemporary ideas of beauty."
Here's Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, with bigger boobs...
Here's Raphael's Three Graces with much-needed thigh gap...
And here's Edgar Degas' La Toilette, but without all that back fat.
[insert eye roll here]
"Throughout art history, painters from Titian to Rubens to Gauguin found beauty in the bodies of women who would never fit into a size 0," Lauren explains. She has a point: We hang these classics in museums. We probably won't do the same with the latest cover of Maxim.
Check out all of Take Part's Photoshopped paintings here.