At Talent Management modelling agency, we know all too well that retouching models’ shots is common place in the fashion and beauty industry.  With beauty firms blending models’ lines out in anti-wrinkle cream ads, to fashion brands unashamedly blended out their models’ kneecaps, we’ve seen it all. But just how often this kind of thing happen?

BuzzFeed recently spoke to a professional unsurprisingly anonymous retoucher to find out. Read on for the top most shocking revelations from the interview…

100% of what’s in fashion magazines is retouched

“There’s just no way an image would be released without any retouching at all so every single ad would have that disclaimer on it. And absolutely 100 percent of what’s in fashion magazines is retouched… You can never have no retouching across the board, because some of it you just have to do if something’s really distracting in a picture.”

Mascara ads are the biggest lie of all

“I do work on a lot of cosmetics images, too, and the mascara ads are just ridiculous. They wear false eyelashes, of course, in the photoshoot, and we completely draw the lashes in one by one so it’s just like a forest of eyelashes. That’s like the biggest lie of all — you can’t achieve that.”

‘Frankenstein’ models are commonplace

“Retouchers do things like cut out a head from one photo and put it on the body from another. I do that kind of stuff all the time. Let’s say they do a photoshoot with a model and the body comes out well, but she’s got a wonky look on her face. They might want to put this head on that body. Or they want to put an arm from one photo on the body of another — that’s common.”

Clothes get retouched as well as models

“With fashion itself, sometimes the clothes are not fitting the way they’re supposed to. They’re always pinned in the back, for example, and then the wrinkles are taken out with retouching. So the clothes are kind of a lie, too. Nothing is going to fit that perfectly when you try it on.”

Skinny models’ get protruding bones smoothed out

“I have smoothed boniness before — like when models have bones sticking out of their chest, they want that subdued. That’s somewhat common.”

Models’ perfect skin is a lie

“We completely remove veins and freckles and moles and bags under the eyes all the time. We often remove body hair, subdue wrinkles, whiten teeth, pop the eyes. We also smooth kneecaps and veins in the hands and things like that — anything that’s distracting that takes away from the product being featured.”