Esther Honig, a 24-year-old freelance journalist from Kansas City, put the saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" to the test with this fascinating project titled Before & After. She sent an unaltered photo of herself to over 40 Photoshop enthusiasts in 25 different countries and made the simple request: "Make me beautiful."
The results were astounding. "Seeing some jobs for the first time made me shriek… Other times images, like the one from Morocco, took my breath away because they were far more insightful than I could have expected," Honig told BuzzFeed.Â
The pics also launch an interesting conversation on the use of digital manipulation in promoting unattainable beauty standards across the globe. Honig says, "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 illusive."Â
