This just wrong. There aren’t enough words to express how wrong. First of all, it’s wrong that child beauty pageants exist. Even more wrong that there are mothers willing to enter their kids in child beauty pageants. Even wrong-er (it’s a word…now) that “pageant photo retouching” businesses exist in the first place. So wrong that the very fabric of time and space was rent asunder is that a pageant photo retouching company would take a kinda cute little girl and turn her into something that looks just plain scary. Didn’t I see this girl in Bride of Chucky?

There is nothing wrong with using Photoshop to clean up an image a bit. Correct uneven skin tone or reduce redness, fade dark circles under the eyes, airbrush out blemishes and maybe a few stray hairs…nothing wrong with that at all, especially if the photo will be printed and framed. Turning the kid into a prostitot wearing more makeup than most 20-year-old girls and using PS (ineptly) to remove every scrap of humanity from her features, though, is just fucking wrong. This is worse than those “glamour” photos that middle-aged women have done in an effort to keep their husbands from chasing those overly-made-up 20-year-olds. It’s creepy, and of no use whatsoever as a portfolio shot because it doesn’t look anything like the kid. If (FSM forbid) I were running a child beauty pageant, I’d want to see the kids that were entering, and a poorly photoshopped shot that looks like a bad cartoon of a child would not help me in the least. I wonder whether mothers anywhere but the US (probably Canada, too, since it’s so Americanised now) do this to their kids, or whether it’s exclusively (or nearly so) a North American phenomenon? Are there any “Little Miss Copenhagen” or “Little Miss Crete” competitions? Do 5-year-olds get manicured and spray-tanned in Vienna? Somehow, I doubt it.