Fake me! Is that what you really look like?

"Fakeme" is the name of the company that has posted an advertisement through my door, they are a company who specialise in digitally altering photographs. I sit studying the piece of card: a highly professional looking publication with an image of a women in a bikini walking out of the sea on it. She has a curvy body with a bit of weight sitting on her hips and waist, and she has a tattoo on her hip. This image is on a kind of flap, when I fold back this flap an image of the same woman is underneath. Here she has a completely flat, toned stomach, no curves, and no tattoo.

"Everyone is faking it" the advertisement tells me, then asks: "Why aren't you?"

 Do all of us really want to ditch the bodies we were born with and exchange them for the toned ones we always see in the media? I would say yes. If we were asked which woman would we like to be: the one on the front of the flap or the edited image underneath, the majority of us would not hesitate in saying that we would much rather be the latter. However, this service can not transform you into this woman. It can, however, make others think that you are this woman.

Fakeme claims on this hand-out that the service they offer is "perfect for Facebook and On-line dating sites." This disturbs me slightly that there are many of us who see no harm in presenting photographs of ourselves, via the internet, that do not properly portray the way they look. Is this not false advertising?

Another service offered by the Fakeme team is the alteration of wedding photographs. On their website they say: "What could be a better finish to your precious Wedding Album than to give it the Fakeme treatment." Marriage is surely the ultimate gesture of acceptance and love. By marrying someone you are saying "I accept and love you, warts and all", at least this is what I believe. Therefore to edit and alter  this day and the moments between you and your life partner surely contradicts what the entire concept of weddings are about. The day I marry a man who wants photographs of me altered is the day I have married the wrong man.

I can't deny that sometimes I would like to change certain aspects of my body and that sometimes I do feel insecure about the way I look. Therefore, I cannot begin an attack on the nation under a false wonderment of why these photo editing services appeal to us so much. Fakeme evidently is successful otherwise they would not have the money to produce the glossy, professional looking leaflet which has arrived through my door. However, surely we need to reach a point where we realise an edited version of ourselves is not the real us, no matter how much we want it to be. Perhaps we should stop Fakeme-ing and start accepting.