CULTURE

Emilia Clarke Speaks Out Against Celebrities Photoshopping Themselves on Instagram

“I do not like it, it doesn’t make me feel good.”

by Marissa G. Muller

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@emilia_clarke

Scrolling through Instagram, it’s become increasingly hard to tell impromptu selfies from ones that have been altered using photoshop apps like Facetune, and Emilia Clarke find this to be a problem. The Game of Thrones star recently opened up about why this is so dangerous and toxic, saying that apps like these should be made illegal.

For Clarke, seeing retouched photos of other people—or even just knowing that there’s a possibility you could see these images and not realize they’re doctored—leaves a knot in her stomach. “I struggle with the girl next door also editing their pictures,” Clarke recently told Miss Vogue. “It’s not right. Where is that human interaction? I think that the apps that make people airbrush themselves and look thinner or look clearer skinned should be banned. I don’t think this shit should be on the phone for young people. I do not agree with it, I do not like it, it doesn’t make me feel good. I don’t do it on my Instagram. I filter, sure, everybody’s got to filter! But ain’t no way that I’m going to retouch that stuff.”

There’s also the issue that celebrities, who have outsize influence our era’s definition of beauty, often have a lot of help that most people don’t see. “Celebrities get professionals to work with them on their diet, exercise, hair and make-up, even Spanx—all of it,” Clarke says. “It’s not real. It’s all fake.”

Even Clarke has been the victim of photoshop before, as she shared. “Back in the day, there were certain movie posters where I was like, ‘Hey guys, I ain’t got no DDs. I’m very happy with what I’ve got, and it’s not what you’ve put on that poster,’” she said. “But that was not the stuff that I’m doing right now.”

Right now, she is more concerned with the fact that inner beauty isn’t as valued as outer beauty. “I think that we can find our inner beauty by looking inwards and not outwards,” she said. “Seriously. Now we’re really screwed because we’ve got the editing, we’ve got the shading, we’ve got all that bloody nonsense. They don’t look like that. Ain’t nobody look like that!…My heart bleeds, because I struggled as a kid. I thought that what the girls looked like in magazines, on TV, in film, were real. And they’re not real.…Lean into your body type.…There’s nothing wrong with being tall and skinny, there’s nothing wrong with being an absolutely bone normal size 12 or being anything bigger than that. Nothing wrong with it.” Take it from Clarke.