JOURNALIST AND BLOGGER Esther Honig sent a photograph of herself to nearly 40 professional and amateur Photoshop designers from more than 25 countries. She asked one thing: “Make me beautiful.”

Her project illustrates a stunning cross-cultural interpretation of beauty. Honig proclaims, “In the US, Photoshop has become a symbol of our society’s unobtainable standards for beauty. My project, Before & After, examines how these standards vary across cultures on a global level. Photoshop allows us to achieve our unobtainable standards of beauty, but when we compare those standards on a global scale, achieving the ideal remains all the more elusive.”

Each image in the selection below is a reflection of personal and sociocultural conceptions of beauty — all derived from the same photograph.

Photos courtesy of Esther Honig

1

Esther Honig: Before & After

Left to right: Original photo of Esther Honig, Morocco, Argentina.

2

Australia

3

Bangladesh

4

Chile

5

Germany

6

Greece

7

India

8

Indonesia

9

Israel

10

Italy

11

Phillipines

12

Sri Lanka

13

Ukraine

14

United Kingdom

15

United States

16

Venezuela

17

Vietnam