Lena Dunham is beyond proud of her body – just watch any episode of Girls where she bares all without hesitation – so it would be pretty ballsy for a magazine to Photoshop the star.
Spanish magazine El País recently featured the actress and writer on their cover. Sure, every magazine enhances the lighting and gets rid of a line or two, but it seems that El País made Lena’s body look much slimmer than it really is. Lena was thrilled to be on the front page, but she wasn’t going to let their over the top Photoshopping job slide.
Lena took to Instagram to call them out. She writes, “Oh hello El Pais! I am genuinely honored to be on your cover and so happy you licensed a pic by @ruvenafanador, who always makes me feel gorgeous. BUT this is NOT what my body has ever looked like or will ever look like- the magazine has done more than the average photoshop. So if you’re into what I do, why not be honest with your readers? Much love, Lena.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BCZE4J3i1Dl/?taken-by=lenadunham
For comparison purposes, here’s the original photo published in Entertainment Weekly back in 2013.
Entertainment WeeklyToday, El País responded with an open letter to Lena. Instead of an apology, they say they didn’t alter the pic.
“We are aware that any media outlet needs to be responsible for what it publishes, but this photo was previously approved by the agency, the photographer and your publicist…Here at TENTACIONES, we acquired the photo via the Corbis agency, and we used the original that they sent us without applying any kind of retouching. Those who are familiar with and follow our magazine will know that we do not use Photoshop nor other digital tools to change the physical appearance of our cover stars, nor in the features to be found inside. On this occasion, the only thing we did was to crop the image to adapt it to the format of our front page.”
Honestly, this shot from the open letter looks pretty legit. Maybe Lena overreacted?
What do you think – what the photo altered or just cropped?
