Did High School Digitally Slim Girls' Yearbook Photos?

A viral story about how a high school allegedly used Photoshop to change their students yearbook photos to make them thinner started on Reddit earlier this week and has appeared on Gawker, Jezebel, Gizmodo, PerezHilton, and elsewhere.

Headlines included, "All Girls' High School Retouches Photos to Make Students Look Thinner" and "Terrible High School Photoshops Girls' Yearbook Photos to Make Them Look Thinner."

One of the first to post the story, Jezebel.com, explained that "One student ... took to Reddit to express her outrage with her new photo -- which she claims was a second ID issued to everyone apropos of nothing -- and point out how ridiculous it is to photoshop young women's faces, especially when she has spent such a long time learning to love everything about herself."

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The outrage on social media is not surprising given the widespread concern about the influence of airbrushing and images of idealized beauty on young women.

However there's reason to be wary of the story in its many incarnations, especially since it was based entirely on a post by an anonymous Reddit user who says she attends an unnamed girls school, with virtually no other details. Because the high school is not named, no one can contact them for comment or check on it.

Here's what the Reddit user wrote: "I go to an all girls high school and today every senior got a new student ID. We had gotten one in the beginning of the school year and we were all unsure as to why we were given a second. After closer inspection we realized that our photos had been retouched far past smoothing out blemishes... Going to an all girls school we are constantly reminded about positive body image and accepting ourselves for who we are. Having these changes made to make me appear thinner makes me wonder how must our school practices what they preach."

By consulting the original post we see that some of the headlines and stories were partly wrong (or at least misleading). The high school yearbook photos themselves were not digitally altered; instead the same photos were used for both the yearbook and the student IDs. It's not as if students and their parents would receive a yearbook with photographs in them that had been digitally altered to make the girls look thinner.

Gizmodo's hyperbolic headline "High School Yearbook Photoshops Girl's Face Beyond Recognition" is especially strange since a photograph of a person's face changed "beyond recognition" would defeat the purpose of a photo ID. Jezebel writer Mark Shrayber also misunderstood the Reddit post, asking "isn't the whole point of student photos to get a realistic look of what one looked like during their awkward years? What fun is it to look back on an old yearbook and not chortle at how ridiculous you looked?"

There are other reasons to suspect that there's more to the story, for example it seems doubtful that a high school would pay a photographer to use the Photoshop image program to alter photos of every student at the school for their IDs. It's of course possible, but would be very expensive and unlikely; most schools dont have an in-house photography department that would routinely change or alter student photos for whatever reason.

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Did High School Digitally Slim Girls' Yearbook Photos?