What’s your idea of the perfect woman in South Africa? Wanna bet it defers the suggestion below?

18 female graphic designers from countries around the world were given an image which they were then asked to change according to what the people in their country would find most attractive. This was their assignment:

Photoshop her form (see below). The idea is to Photoshop and retouch this woman to make her more attractive to the citizens of your country. We are looking to explore how perceptions of beauty change across the world. Multiple designers are involved. You can modify clothing, but her form must be visible. No nudity. All other changes, including those to her shape and form, are up to you.

Superdrug‘s Online Doctor, who conducted the experiment, explained why:

Widely held perceptions of beauty and perfection can have a deep and lasting cultural impact on both women and men. The goal of this project is to better understand potentially unrealistic standards of beauty and to see how such pressures vary around the world.

We focused on female designers, as we wanted a woman’s view of what her culture finds attractive and to understand more about the pressures they face. However, in order to get entries from more countries, we accepted contributions from four men with the caveat that they first seek input from women and base their design changes on this feedback.

We used three designers from international locales with whom we were already acquainted, but most of the artists featured were contracted via freelance job boards. We attempted to get as wide a spread as possible across the world, but many countries are poorly represented on these job boards, particularly when it comes to female designers. We also had issues finding interested artists in some countries due to the amount of skin shown on the model.

Here are the results from the different countries around the world:

Although the results offer an interesting insight into the differences in the female form around the world, it’s once again difficult to take anything seriously when only one person was asked to recreate such request.

What do you think of South Africa’s ideal female form?

[source: telegraph]