I am writing tomorrow’s entry today. Well, it’s technically tomorrow since it’s almost two a.m. and I’m not tired since I took a deep four-hour nap when I got home from work. This is where insomnia brings you: a magical land where it is simultaneously two days at once and no day at all.

I’m posting this now because I have a busy day tomorrow and also because I’m organizing my computer files and just rediscovered something I wanted to share with you last year, but the chupacabra wouldn't let me. At the time, it positively put its little cloven hoof down, but as it now seems distracted with a crumb of feta cheese on the kitchen floor, I'll give you the skinny.

It all started when I saw this Internet commercial from Dove, from their “Real Beauty” campaign, or whatever it was called. I was completely blown away by the transformation of a perfectly normal woman into a space alien.

The peril of posting a year late is that I’m sure you have already seen it a million times, and possibly even this brilliant parody:

What the chupacabra has forbidden you to see until now is what happened after I became fascinated with the concept of using Photoshop to transform people into the version of themselves that other people would actually prefer to see. Below are three random photographs I took from the web to use as victims in my own experiments. The originals are on the left and my versions are on the right. I had hesitated to post these to protect their privacy, but then I figured, hey, this is why they’re always warning you about putting your pictures on the Internet. Anyway, the point is that three perfectly normal men have become hunks thanks to my divine* intervention.

The funny thing is, I originally began this experiment out of the spine-tingling horror that the things we see all around us—portrayed as reality—are really the objects of intense and deliberate manipulation. While as Dove has pointed out, this has always been true of how we depict the “ideal woman” with images that have airbrushed and distorted the poor creatures away from any resemblance to their actual species, what is even more disturbing is how the “news” has done the same thing with the figures their corporate bosses have chosen to champion.

Such a transformation is the object of my next study, where I applied an actual tutorial of how to Photoshop a cover girl to one of the most artificial figures of all time:

* This miracle of homoeroticism is really going to secure my godfatherhood, I can feel it in my bones.