If you're a beauty lover, you definitely know Wayne Goss. One of the original beauty YouTubers, he's equally known for his common-sense approach to makeup and his incredible line of brushes.
Now, Goss is lifting back the curtain on something many people didn't even know existed — "living Photoshop," which allows YouTubers to fake perfect skin in videos with just one click.
Wayne starts the video with zero makeup on, filming in natural daylight. You can clearly see the way his skin looks.
"This is what I look like," he says. "When people say, 'Oh, Wayne, you're aging backwards' … no, I'm not. I'm very honest about how I film," he says, explaining that in order to capture the full detail of beauty products, he uses professional lighting.
He turns those lights on... and suddenly looks absolutely incredible with no additional makeup.
This isn't a surprise to any of us who have ever taken a selfie with a ring light; good lighting is a life-changer.
So you can imagine that if Wayne put makeup on, and photographed or filmed it under those lights, "it’s gonna look really, really flawless."
"That’s why I tend to look better in videos than I do in real life!" he says.
But Wayne went one step further — explaining that many beauty YouTubers are now using digital filters to artificially perfect their skin, creating a beauty standard that is literally impossible to live up to.
He turns on the filter, which he calls "living Photoshop," and the results are SHOCKING.
With one click, Wayne's skin has been transformed into porcelain perfection. Pores, lines, under-eye circles — all are vanished, thanks to the power of this editing program.
If Goss were a less ethical makeup artist, he could tell you that these insane results — created by powerful video manipulation software — are the result of his new skin care routine (#spon), or a brand new foundation he's trying. You'd look at this and believe what you're seeing was real.
And lies like that are so, so wrong.
Wayne says that once he started researching it, he came across scores of YouTubers that use this digital trickery. "And it IS trickery, giving people the idea that you can create THIS LOOK with products, when YOU CAN’T. It's not possible."
The most damaging example he cites is of a makeup artist applying foundation to a model who had "normal" skin, with some freckles. "She applied these products," said Goss. "And suddenly, the skin was like porcelain. I was thinking, OH MY GOD SHE’S AMAZING."
But it turned out that this unnamed artist was using this video filter, not a new product or her own expertise.
"As [the artist] pushed the product to the camera, the filter that was over the model’s face snapped off. And you could see all the freckles, all the layers of foundation. And as she moved the product away, the filter snapped back on. The model looked poreless and flawless again."
"This is what I look like," said Wayne, snapping the filter off again. "And this is why we feel so fuckin' ugly about ourselves."
"We see these pictures on Instagram with all the filters and the lights. And now we’re seeing them in living, moving motion. And it is wrong. Foundation and makeup can make you look more beautiful, but it can’t do this."
It is SO IMPORTANT that Wayne speaks out about this incredibly misleading trick.
Social media can really affect the way we feel about ourselves. We all know that the Kardashian's FaceTune their selfies, but according to the thousands of comments on Wayne's Instagram, very few people knew that YouTubers were throwing "pretty filters" onto their tutorials to improve the way they look.
"I always wondered how every YouTuber/IG tutorials were getting their skin to look soo dreamy … even when tons of makeup is being layered .. not a single texture to the skin.. "but it's a video, it must be real". Or so I thought!" wrote one fan.
"Now that I know about this f$&@ it, I'm done being lied to. We are flawed and I like flaws, shows that you have lived life," said another.
Watch Wayne's entire video right here. It's one of the most important things you'll see today.
It's so important that we call out these unrealistic beauty standards wherever we find them — makeup should be about self-expression, not outright lies.
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