This week, Ellen DeGeneres was announced as the new face of CoverGirl. While I’m a big fan of the very out and very outspoken talk show host, I feel a little uneasy about where CoverGirl is really coming from with their latest cover girl choice. Without a doubt, DeGeneres is likable, quirky, relatable—heck, she’s even “easy breezy.” But hawking a major cosmetics brand? I don’t know. To me, it feels gimmicky and phony, like a marketing ploy, in the same way the Dove campaign for “real beauty” did. As it turned out, Dove airbrushed those real women into oblivion. I didn’t buy that Dove ever thought real women with real cellulite and real curves were really beautiful. Nor do I buy that CoverGirl really thinks Ellen is representative of their very airbrushed All-American girl image. I mean, it’d be one thing if she were a lipstick lesbian, but does Ellen even like makeup? Maybe she does. Maybe she doesn’t. But I’m willing to bet she’s not hung up on it. Color me cynical, but using unconventional beauty to sell products designed to bring women closer to the ideal standard of conventional beauty just seems disingenuous to me. So what do you think?

Wonderbra is trying to organize the world’s biggest underwear shoot ever, and let me tell you, there is a lot of competition in this category. They’re looking for 1,000 women in London to photograph in their new line of bras. We smell a bigger version of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. At least with so many models, the people will be so small that airbrushing won’t really be a factor. [MarieClaire.co.uk]

Dove finally issued a statement about the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty ads and whether they were airbrushed. They say that there wasn’t any major retouching on the photos, only removal of dust and minor color correction. Pascal Dangin, the retoucher, confirms this: “The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the Dove “real women” ad. I only worked on the Dove ProAge campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do color correction—both the integrity of the photographs and the women’s natural beauty were maintained.” Who can you believe? [JolieNadine.com via Jezebel]

Previously: Even “Real” Women Are Digitally Enhanced