Okay. So my headline needs work. Whatever — deal with it.

Last weekend, Dan and I went over to our friend Ashley’s  house to hang out. Ashley’s a professional photographer (probably the best I’ve ever seen, by the way, and I don’t say that because she’s my friend — I say it because it’s true!) and we somehow got on the topic of outrageous Photoshop disasters. Then, Ashley pulled up Photoshop on her Macbook showed me just how easy it is to edit and morph images of people to make them look completely different. It blew my mind. I know Photoshop is powerful, but to see it in action is baffling.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the world at all, or have been following my blog for any length of time, you know that 99.9% of the images you see in magazines are Photoshopped. Maybe it’s desensitization to the issue, I don’t know, but I don’t get the urge to blog about each and every image I come across, pointing out all the obvious ways the image is distorted. I’ve just grown to accept that Photoshop isn’t going away and, if anything, it’s becoming more and more widely used. Sigh. I don’t like it, but it’s not like one little blog out there is going to change anything.

But every once in a while, a magazine will go way too far and piss me too far off to not talk about it. Grazia did that for me this week. Check out these magazine covers from Grazia, showing the same exact image of Kate Middleton.

Image source: Jezebel

Grazia! What are you doing? That’s the SAME. EXACT. PHOTO. How did you think no one would notice?

Okay, so seeing these images initially made me angry for the same reason all Photoshopped images make me angry. Someone out there took a picture of another human being and decided she wasn’t thin enough so they just had to edit her waist down to an impossible size. And publish it for millions of people to see.

But then I stopped and thought, Holy crap, this is Princess Kate Middleton on her bloody wedding day. First of all, if I found out that my wedding photographer Photoshopped the pictures of my big day to indicate that I got married without a freaking ribcage, I would punch her. But, that glaring fact aside, do any of you reading this remember the headlines surrounding Kate before her wedding to Prince William?

• Shredding for the Royal Wedding — Is Kate Middleton Too Thin?
• Kate Middleton Stressed and Skinny Before Royal Wedding
• Kate Middleton Loses Weight Before Wedding
• Kate Middleton’s Drastic Weight Loss Creating Scary Skinny Health Concern for Brides
• Kate Middleton Dress Designer, & Will She Stay Skinny?

And so many more.

So. Even after all the hoopla surrounding Kate being too skinny, Grazia evidently thought she still wasn’t skinny enough for the cover of their British magazine.

According to the lovely, smart, talented ladies at HelloGiggles, the folks at Grazia responded to the public’s outrage by saying they “reassure all our readers that we did not purposely make any alteration of the Duchess of Cambridge’s image to make her appear slimmer and we are sorry if this process gave that impression.”

Yeah. Okay. That story holds about as much water as Kate Middleton’s non-existent stomach.