I think we all agree that magazines have gone a little overboard with Photoshopping photos in a quest for perfection on their beautiful, glossy pages. It can be detrimental to women’s attitudes about our own bodies when we see models with pencil-like legs and whittled-down waists. But what about when photo retouching makes women larger than they are in real life? Is that also bad for us “real” women?

Magazine editors seem to have noticed (at last!) that women need to see models and actresses in a truer form, without the work of makeup artists and retouchers to mask their pores, cellulite, and wrinkles. The upcoming issue of French Elle, which hits newsstands this weekend, features Eva Herzigova, Monica Bellucci, Sophie Marceau, Charlotte Rampling, and four other females sans fards, which is a French idiom that literally means “without rouge/makeup,” but implies “openness.”

We’re totally psyched to see beautiful women in a more natural, albeit still extremely flattering light. Photographer Peter Lindbergh snapped the women, so they’re not anything like the horribly unattractive candids our friends take of us around 1 a.m. after we’ve ingested a few cocktails, but they’re the closest a fashion magazine is going to get.

Just like every other impressionable tween, I saw models in magazines and felt a little bad about myself because my body didn’t look like theirs. I’m a smart girl, but it didn’t really set in that these were not their bodies (or faces, even) until I worked at a magazine and saw how photos were tweaked—who wants to look at pages of ugly people? On Newsweek.com, a writer takes part in a photo shoot, then goes through the lengthy retouching process, demonstrating how much work it actually takes to make someone look “flawless”.