Hello Everyone,

This post is a bit different than what I usually write. I usually write more objective advice or informative posts, but this week I decided to write about a personal experience. Let me know what you think of these types of posts.

For those of you who don’t know I have a passion for beauty and makeup. I make youtube videos about it. I just finished filming a makeup tutorial and I was doing some post production of photos I took of myself. I started doing some digital photo retouching with a software called picmonkey (which I love and use all the time). I wanted to improve the lighting a bit.

I started fixing the exposure and I noticed that I had a little spot on my face. I went in with a blemish remover and noticed that they had an airbrushing feature. I smoothed out wrinkles and imperfections, and blew out the exposure. I brightened my eyes and did a few more things.

At first I was pretty impressed with my skills. I thought the picture looked pretty good, but then I started to feel guilty. This person wasn’t real, and couldn’t be achieved with makeup. How could I post this artificial picture to advertise my tutorial. And why was I so easily willing to seek out and erase every flaw. It was so easy for me to get carried away.

In our selfie obsessed society it is so easy to get carried away with photo editing apps and filters. And believe me I am a selfie queen, but I usually don’t go over board like I did. It’s easy to admire yourself in overly edited photos, but at the end of the day you can’t compete with that kind of flawlessness. I decided to just post the original photo and be proud of it.

Some of you might be annoyed at me for writing this because I have good skin, and I look younger than my age. But we all have flaws and things we don’t like. In full disclosure I do artificially whiten my teeth in photos. I don’t mind them in videos, but they look worse in photos. I just wanted to be completely honest.

The bottom line is love yourself, and appreciate your beauty.

<3Jen

P.s. Here is a link to my youtube channel just in case you’re interested 😉

https://www.youtube.com/misplacedmoo