Shine OnNew selfie app lets you shave 15 pounds off your face
Want to look 15 pounds lighter in your selfie? There's an app for that.
A distasteful new app call SkinneePix lets users shed 5, 10 or 15 pounds off their selfies with the simple click of a button.
Pretty Smart Women, the Phoenix-based company that created the $0.99 iPhone app, is taking some rightly deserved heat online for promoting an unrealistic skinny ideal.
"In the same disgusting way that starlets and models are airbrushed, Photoshopped and altered when they grace magazine covers, this app takes the Instagram filter one step further and allows for self-slimming," Sarah Grey writes for Salon.
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"All Skinneepix is doing is further emphasizing the impossible standards of beauty we’re confronted with every day, which — let’s face it — isn’t going to help anyone do anything but feel awful about themselves," Lucia Peters writes for Bustle.
In light of these criticisms, the company's developers have come out defending their product saying they never intended the app to replace a healthy diet or exercise when it comes to losing weight and are not telling people that they need to be skinny.
"You've always heard about the camera adding 15 pounds, we just wanted to level the playing field," Susan Green tells Huffington Post.
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Green says she came up with the idea after going on vacation with friends, none of whom liked how they looked in photographs.
"What I've found in this is that women who are 100 pounds and women who are 250 pounds, everyone has some issue with their body," says Green. "Some people are like well, you're messing with someone's image and you're trying to tell people they should be skinny. No, that's the exact opposite of what we're doing."
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What Green fails to realize is that by encouraging a person to artificially slim down their online image, in particular a selfie -- which by nature breeds self-consciousness, she is opening up a dangerous can of worms.
"For all the teenage girls in the danger zone for eating disorders, this is a red flag," Smriti Sinha writes for Policy Mic.
In an era where individuals and companies struggle to promote messages of self-love and body acceptance for young girls, this app certainly lacks judgement.
