That website is a hoot. Clearly the person running it has little idea of how to actually use Photoshop (one hint - don't paste a mouthful of adult teeth into a baby's mouth). I'm going to use this as the "How Not To" example next time I teach a Photoshop class.

This is of course what Olive's entire family rejected, hilariously, in the last few minutes of the movie.

Is there a growing social undercurrent of disgust at such attitudes as are exhibited by this "retouching"? I hope so. The atmosphere of the movie's beauty contest was nauseating; the only way to tolerate it was with laughter. I feel the same about the retouching site; but when the laughter subsides, I feel like reaching for a fifth of cheap whiskey and drinking myself blind.

I always wanted my baby to look like a cross between a CPR training dummy and Kelly Ripa!

This is NOT good retouching. The goal is to make people look like themselves but prettier...not to make them look like they're made of plastic.

They turned her into Bride of Chucky... or if there's ever a big-budget CG remake, it'll be something like that. Scary!

I thought the "before" was a little overdone, to be honest. But my ideal of a cute toddler photo generally involves a smashed banana.

Admittedly, doing this for pageant-type photos does seem excessive, but there are cases when touching up infant photos make sense. My now 4 year old son was born with a mole called a hairy nevus somewhat larger than a quarter on his forehead, just above his left eyebrow. This was black, had hair growing out of it, etc. It was both cosmetically shocking, and also can be very likely to go cancerous, especially when exposed to lots of sun, which is hard to avoid with foreheads.

When we sent out our first christmas card, we photoshopped the pic to remove the mole. Since he was having his first round of plastic surgery to begin removing it within another 2 months, we didn't want to shock everyone with a pre-surgery picture. Now, at age 4, after 4 operations, he just has a thin Harry Potter scar over his eyebrow, the removed tissue was all benign, and no regrowth has occurred, so he looks basically like the photo-shopped pic at 6 months.

So I think there are cases where photoshopping baby pics makes sense, especially to correct cosmetic issues that are going to be surgically corrected while they're still kids (moles/nevuses, cleft palates, port wine stains, etc, etc).

I cannot be the only person sick and tired of ugly children. This seems like a perfectly reasonable way to make a growing segment of our population more visually appealing and I don't see anything wrong with that. I actually think our MSM has been doing this to our news for quite some time and that hasn't caused any problems. Oh, wait...

A month ago an old friend from highschool e-mailed me pictures of her 5 and 9yr old girls done up like this. I shreiked in horror and deleted them immediately...it was the doll eyes that really got me.

I thought she had just gotten a bad touch up job, I had no idea that it was an industry.

Ditto on the smashed banana being the key to cute toddler pictures...or maybe cake icing in the hair.

If you keep following the links for "more samples" on the site, you get to a toddler in a disgusting blue hat who looks like a drag queen. It's even scarier than the baby.

RandomUsername, but then you see the baby in real life and think, holy sh-t, that's one fugly baby! Oy.

The website for "Pageant Photo Retouching" is on a do-it-yourself webpage designed by Kid Pageant Guru (?) Alycia Collins ironically named: http://www.naturalbeautiescontest.homestead.com/retouch.html

Natural Beauties? Really?

There's a page on the site where Collins gives a shout out to some of her various pageant beauties accompanied by their retouched photos. One pageant mom at least had some sense: "Little Jozelle! Mom requested to not have your photos posted, but I want you to know how proud I am of you!"

Anonymous, the cleft palate and mole issues you address do not seem to be the retouches these particular sites are referring to. And glad the surgeries went well.

Ugh...the baby in lavender doesn't look like a doll - she looks embalmed.

...because people who put their kids in pageants are not normal. 'Nuff said.

This is definitely not normal... because people who put their kids in pageants are not normal. 'Nuff said.

Although I pretty much agree, I usually dislike painting individuals with such a wide brush. Anyone care to weigh on the healthy side or at least not un-healthy side of baby and kid pageants?

Look, if the baby isn't going to pluck her eyebrows you have to fix it in post production.

SO many babies neglect this.

Damn those babies who won't wear eyeliner, fake lashes, blush, and lipstick! And stop crying when the nice doctor gives you botox injections.

Seriously, though, something's wrong when a society (quite rightly) condemns child molestation, but then tarts up their kids to look like this.

This story should be shocking but is nothing new to me. I worked in a retouching studio / photo lab for several years doing just what the story described. We "fixed" every age of people, even a dead person from time to time. You have no idea how vain people are until you see what they request when they have a photo retouched. We kept files of teeth, lips and eyes on our computers. Many people would be shocked to learn that the photo they sent in to be retouched would come back to them with pieces and parts off of other people. If you were good enough you would never know what lengths we went to to make them look like they think they look.

What used to be an arduous process with an air-brush can be done in Photoshop in a matter of minutes, and quite frankly it's not all that difficult.

You would be horrified to hear what we talk about while retouching your protrait, it was a lousy job and making fun of prople was a good way to pass the time.