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
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