How To: un-Photoshop

For beauty brand Dove, the concept of “real beauty” has long been the central idea in their communication. In the past they’ve featured “regular” women of all shapes, sizes and skin tones, not subjected to excessive digital manipulation.
One more step in their championing of “real beauty” is an unbranded, underground Photoshop-inspired viral campaign, "marketed" through Reddit disguised as a photo-editing tool that “beautifies” automatically, and could be downloaded and used for free.
But when you do use it, it tricks you into thinking you’re adding a diffused glow to the picture, while it reverses all the Photoshop effects you applied to the image returning it to its original state. This video shows exactly how it works. Clever.

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Kors bites into beauty business

Michael Kors is launching a skincare and colour cosmetics line that will go on sale in August in Macy's in the US and in selective flagships globally. The range will have three distinct collections -- Sporty, Sexy and Glam -- each with a fragrance, lip colours and nail lacquers.
"I think those three things -- sexy, sporty and glam -- have always been the DNA of Michael Kors, and in a strange way, the Michael Kors woman really is all three of those things. It's just that she feels more strongly about one of them at certain given times," said Kors, who also cites his grandmother and mother and influencers for the line.
The range will also include a three bronzers, brushes, summer body products like a body crème, dry oil, bath beads, self tanner, sun gelée and sun-protect lip balm. In other words, the sexy, sporty, glam and aspirational jetsetter.
Basics like foundations and mascaras are conspicuously missing from the line but the omission is deliberate.
"At the end of the day, I try to take a woman and make it easy for her in general," Kors says. "I always think the trick is, how do you look like you haven’t spent a bunch of time when in fact it probably did take a lot of time. I wanted to do the essentials -- the things you absolutely have to have to represent that mood.”
Which would include a print and advertising campaign shot by Mario Testino and featuring Estonian model Karmen Pedaru.
For many fashion designers, creating make-up collections is a natural next step in expanding their brand to new yet related business industries. But beauty buyers are demanding, and that’s probably why designer-driven successful beauty brands are but a handful.
Can Kors become another Chanel, Dior or Saint Laurent?

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Dove's 'Real Beauty Sketches' go viral

Are women their own worst beauty critics? Dove’s poignant new campaign proves they are.
The brand’s experiment, which shows how women view their own beauty in contrast to what others see, went viral since its release on April 14 2013 -- 20,787,660 views (at the time of publishing) in less than two weeks.
Gil Zamora, an FBI-trained forensic artist who has drawn over 3,000 sketches during his 28-year career, was asked to create composite sketches of seven “real” women -- not models or actors -- based on their descriptions of themselves. The women were separated from him by a curtain during the process.
“I just ask them non-leading questions and I come up with the features based on their memory,” he explains in another video that’s part of the same campaign.
Before the session with Zamora, the women were asked to spend time with a stranger, without being told why. The strangers then sat down with Zamora and gave him their descriptions of the women they met earlier.
The final reveal, with both sketches placed next to each other, was an eye-opening experience for most of the women. You can browse through videos of them talking about their emotional epiphanies on the Real Beauty Sketches campaign page on the Dove website.
Critics of the campaign feel the films are too heavily edited, too melodramatic and that many of the positive descriptions -- “very nice blue eyes” and “a nice thin chin” -- are skewed towards Caucasians. Still, Dove’s overriding message -- “You are more beautiful than you think” -- is a powerful, necessary one and delivered effectively.
Meanwhile, on another planet, men are their own biggest fans says Cladwell, a men's online shopping service, in a parody copy of the Dove film which the company released on YouTube two days after Dove took off. It's completely self-explanatory. Enjoy.

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Aamir Khan being styled by b:blunt's Avan Contractor for the Godrej TVC

Celebrity hairstylist Avan Contractor reinvents actor Aamir Khan as a sassy spinster named Sonia in the new TVC for Godrej and although it’s a gender-bender situation, Contractor says the hairstyle she created for Khan is versatile enough for anyone to wear.
“According to the brief I had to make Aamir look like a slightly older woman yet modern, somewhat like a hip aunty!” Contractor told Vogue.
The creative director of salon b:blunt did a look test with Khan using a few wigs to finalize the shape, length and texture. The haircut they finally agreed on is shoulder-length and layered with a side-swept fringe.
“Based on Aamir’s face shape we framed the hair on his face so it covered his jaw line to make him look softer and more feminine,” Contractor says. A good tip to remember if your face has angular features that you’d like to soften.
The cut is flexible to style and will suit almost every face shape, says Contractor, but avoid it if you have a tiny face or small forehead as it’ll overwhelm your face.
“You can try multiple looks with it,” Contractor says. “Wear it smooth and straight, wear it natural with a little bit of movement. You can even tong it and do a nice roller set to it to give it fullness and volume.”
For the kind of texture you get with this cut, Contractor suggests you use a product that’ll give you volume (like a volumizing spray) and one that will give you hold (like a hair mousse).
“I work a lot with the L'Oréal Professionnel Techni Art Full Volume Extra Mousse and the Resistance Spray Volumactive by Kérastase,” she says.
All good advice for a versatile, feminine hair style like this one, but just try getting Aamir Khan's face out of your mind first. It's tough.
Has he ruined the side-swept fringe forever?

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Angelina Jolie undergoes preventive double mastectomy

 

“My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer,” writes Angelina Jolie, actress and director, in today's op-ed piece for the New York Times after sharing with the world that she'd just undergone a preventive double mastectomy.
“Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could,” she writes. “The decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”
At the core of her difficult decision to undergo surgery was her mother, who she lost after a decade-long battle with the disease, and her children, who questioned her about the illness that took their grandmother away and if the same could happen to their mother.
The preventive double mastectomy involved three months of medical procedures at the Pink Lotus Breast Centre, from Feb 2 to April 27. And in her story, Jolie details the major procedures she underwent and underscores the supportive role played by her partner, actor Brad Pitt.
“I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience...I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices."
 

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