A photographer has revealed how older male celebrities would look like if they were Photoshopped like women.

Commercial photographer and educator Caroline Ross shared a viral video on TikTok in which she underlined the double standards between how older men and women are edited in images.

@caroline_in_thecity I definitely think about this everytime i see a cute little wrinkles on ‘silver foxes’ and smoothed doll skin on women the same age. #pedropascal #maybeitsphotoshop #photoshop ♬ Makeba – Jain

Ross is on a mission to educate people about Photoshop and teaches “digital media literacy skills” on TikTok — revealing exactly how celebrities edit their images.

In the fascinating clip, which has amassed over 1.1 million views, Ross retouches the faces of older male celebrities such as Pedro Pascal, Ryan Reynolds, Ben Affleck, and David Beckham, on magazine covers — as if they were women.

By Photoshopping these older male stars like their female counterparts, Ross reveals how suddenly their wrinkles are almost entirely removed from the photos. Their pores are also airbrushed away and their skin is smoothed out to perfection.

‘This is Sad’

TikTok users were left stunned by Ross’ video and the astonishing disparity between the beauty standards placed on older men and women in commercial photography.

Viewers called it “scary and sad” while others thanked the photographer for her “important commentary.”

“I think we all knew this but seeing it is something else,” one TikTok user writes.

Another user commented on how male celebrities, unlike women, were allowed to look older on magazine covers. In fact, the photography actually emphasized the attractiveness of the men’s age.

“It’s so interesting because in a lot of these [photos], their age is purposefully accentuated with heavy shadows and low lighting,” a viewer writes.

@caroline_in_thecity Replying to @ohfukc as you wish! Part two of photoshopping men to the same standards we apply photoshop to women #maybeitsphotoshop #photoshoppedmen #letwomenage ♬ Makeba – Jain

The clip was so popular that Ross shared a follow-up video in which she Photoshopped male celebrities of all ages like women. The photographer revealed how different Tom Hardy and Jason Momoa would look on magazine covers if they were edited in this way.

‘Every Image is Retouched’

In a previous interview with PetaPixel, Ross, who is based in Vancouver, Canada, explained how Photoshopping older women is an ubiquitous practice in magazine images.

“Nearly every published image of celebrities is retouched. It’s more prevalent on photos of women over 50. Women in media aren’t allowed to age,” Ross says.

“Retouchers try to hide all signs of Photoshop. For example, a 60-year-old plus woman may still have a few wrinkles in the published image, as removing all of them would look too fake. This often tricks viewers to think that the image is real, as there are wrinkles in the image.”

According to a report by The Cut in 2013, retouchers only ever allow women to have three wrinkles on magazine covers.

More of Ross’s work can be seen on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, commercial photography website, wedding photography, and awards website.

Image credits: Photos by Caroline Ross/Caroline in the City.

Deanna Dikeman (Charlotte Street)

In 1985 Deanna Dikeman left her corporate job to take photography classes at Purdue University, a leap in the dark that more than paid off. Dikeman was born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1954 and now lives in Kansas City. She has received numerous awards over the decades for her photography, including the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship, the United States Artists Booth Fellowship, and, this year, the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship,
which is given to established artists.

Dikeman has exhibited frequently in Kansas City, including her celebrated “Leaving and Waving” sequence of pictures she took of her parents for 27 years as they waved goodbye to her, in all kinds of weather, after her visits to their red ranch house in Sioux City. One of the images was shown on the Kansas City Art Institute’s Block Artspace Project Wall from 2002 to 2003, and the series has been featured in several local exhibitions.

Dikeman showed her inspired 2006 installation “Wardrobe” at the Society for Contemporary Photography. While working in a charity thrift store in Columbia, Missouri, she took panoramic photos of clothes, which she positioned side-by-side on racks, in a variety of colors and arrangements. For the exhibit, she wrapped her dramatic, yards-long installation along the walls of the gallery. It was a witty formalist exercise hinting at the excesses of American culture.

In 2018, KC Studio featured Dikeman’s “Sprinklers, Birdbaths and Puddles” series, a tribute of sorts to her late father, in our September/October Artist Pages. Other series have focused on lost pets, evocative domestic interiors and the pageantry of ballroom dancing.

In a recent interview, Dikeman acknowledged that the Guggenheim Fellowship is the culmination of worldwide acclaim for her “Leaving and Waving” photo series and book.

“I never set out to make this series,” she said in a recent interview. “I’ve always taken family portraits. I just happened to notice when I was looking through a group of those photos that there was a series of my parents waving to me as I drove away after visiting them.”

If people tell her that her parents look like the couple in Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic,” Dikeman just laughs. “Well, they are from Iowa,” she says.

In 2009 there is a photo where for the first time her father is no longer there. She continued to take pictures of her mother waving goodbye until 2017. After her funeral that year, Dikeman says, “I took one more photograph of the empty driveway. For the first time in my life, no one was waving back to me.”

The response to Dikeman’s photographic chronicle has been viral. In 2020 “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell” was one of the top 25 stories in The New Yorker, and the photos were reproduced in magazines around the world. Dikeman produced a book of the series, “Leaving and Waving,” which is now in its third printing.

“I really can’t believe it,” she says. “I’ve heard from people from all over the world. A fashion designer from Italy even sent me a couture outfit!

“The pandemic has clearly made people more sensitive to ‘Leaving and Waving,’” Dikeman says. The stories in her photographs are universal: They are about family, and ultimately about the pain of saying goodbye.

This is the image that sums up my son Manus. He’s absolutely in love with doors – obsessed. He had these little yellow suits we put on him because he liked to bum-shuffle around. We call him space man. He’s in his own world and he’s happy. That’s the main ingredient.

I live on a farm in the west of Ireland, on my husband’s family homestead. We’ve always had horses so there’s a couple of little old stables. I’m guessing Manus is about six-and-a-half there; he’s coming up to 10 now, but I could repeat this image today. He still goes to this same spot and wants to play with the door to the washing machine.

It was evident when Manus was born that he had a disability; I identified it very quickly. I spend a lot of long, lonely late nights walking around the yard with him, trying to tire him out to go to bed; our life inside is very fraught. It’s beautiful and amazing but also so bloody hard.

There’s reputed therapeutic value in equestrian therapy for children that have disabilities but it’s not always so. In this case, Manus wants the washing machine door, not the horse. Opening and closing doors are part of his extreme obsessions and rigid routine. That horse is a bright spark. I didn’t have to do anything to get its attention – it seems to be looking at me asking, “What the heck?”

All the stuff in the background just comes and goes: the washing powder, the numnahs, the horse blankets, the pitchfork. I carry my little 35mm camera around and this shot was instinct. I loved 5×4 large format for years and I was always a staunch maker of images that use negatives but with this work I had to use something more practical – so I could dump the camera to save the child, if necessary, from hurting itself – and now I’m shooting on a DSLR with just your bog-standard 50mm lens.

One of the first images I made in this series is of myself pregnant with Manus. I was grieving that I’d never take photos ever again. I already had three children, I thought my career was going down the toilet. But a few years after Manus was born I had to give myself a bit of kick and said, “Lorraine, you have to start taking pictures of your family life.” The kids are good – they don’t tell me to stop. And I don’t spend ages setting up the shot, it’s just a natural flow. In the work, I also talk about how hard it is for the siblings to grow up in a house with a child with a disability. They’re little heroes.

I studied photography in Newport in Wales but I was making photographs long before I went to university. I had a grandad in Connemara who was an image maker. His name was Tommy Tuck and he had a little dark room in his basement. He was a fisher and had a fishing tackle shop but he also made all these images. I loved the mismatch of the two things.

I have an uncle Owen in Connemara and he comes to visit me. He’s in his 50s and has Down’s syndrome. He’s living independently in the city, with help, and he is gender fluid. He and Manus are absolutely in love. They can sit down and look into each other’s eyes for ages and Manus won’t do that with anybody else. They have a knowing.

Inclusion is a word that people are throwing around too handily. Sometimes inclusion can be claustrophobic to someone who needs space to breathe and time to think.

Lorraine Tuck’s CV

Born: Connemara, County Galway, 1978.

Trained: Self-taught in darkroom at home after I borrowed an old enlarger from the Science lab at secondary school. BA Hons in Documentary Photography at University of Wales, Newport, graduating in 2003.

Influences: “Dorothea Lange and the Farm Security Administration – Lange has empathy for those who have less and recognised quickly how photography can be used as a social tool as well as an art form.”

High point: “Being commissioned by Photo Museum Ireland to develop Unusual Gestures. This work has been produced as a touring solo show premiering at Galway international arts festival, and then showing at Photo Museum Ireland (Dublin) and Regional Cultural Centre (Letterkenny).”

Low point: “Having no clear time to make work after having a family.”

Top tip: “Go back again and again.”