Kim Kardashian‘s latest Photoshop faux pas gained attention on TikTok this week after a user pointed out the odd retouching Kardashian did to her neck in a recent picture. Earlier this month, Kardashian shared a photo of herself getting out of a pool and sipping a drink while wearing new Beats Fit Pro earbuds. Commercial photographer Caroline pointed out that Kardashian appeared to edit out her trapezius muscles just to make her neck appear thinner.
Caroline, who frequently posts videos highlighting the liberal use of Photoshop in celebrity photos, asked her followers if they could figure out what was fake about the picture Kardashian posted on Aug. 16. “Kim K. is notorious for photoshopping out her traps. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it makes her neck look smaller,” Caroline said as she pointed to the edited area.
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The photographer went on to show how the water behind Kardashian was “warped,” making it obvious that some work was done. Caroline then reverse-photoshopped the image to make it look more natural. She also noted that screenshots from a behind-the-scenes video of the shoot (which Kardashian herself posted) shoe Kardashian’s neck looking more natural.
Caroline’s followers were stunned. Many couldn’t understand why Kardashian feels the need to edit photos like this when the unedited pictures look natural. “I don’t understand why they do it, the non-edited original is so much better looking,” one person wrote. “The corrected version looks SOOO much better,” another commented.
Many others thanked Caroline for highlighting the changes because these edits can have a negative impact on how people see themselves. “Well this explains why I never like my shoulder in pictures,” one person wrote. “This account helps me to be less critical of myself,” another wrote. “Thx for this. Lately I’ve been picking apart my appearance (including my traps) and was really down trying to figure out how to improve myself,” another wrote.
Kardashian’s latest Photoshop edit comes a few weeks after a controversial Allure interview in which she shot down claims that she is promoting an unattainable and unrealistic beauty standard. “If I’m doing it, it’s attainable,” she said, later adding that she probably cares more about “looking good” than “90% of the people on this planet.” Elsewhere in the interview, Kardashian claimed she was “at peace with not being perfect and I wasn’t like that before.”
Kardashian and her sisters have been accused of editing their pictures for years. They rarely respond to individual allegations, but when Kardashian does, she usually denies it. In one rare case, Kardashian did admit to photoshopping Khloe Kardashian’s daughter True Thompson into photos of her family at Disneyland.
Last year, Khloe Kardashian threatened legal action if an assistant didn’t take down an unedited bikini photo that was mistakenly published. After this move gained attention, Khloe admitted to editing her pictures to “present myself to the world the way I want to be seen and it’s exactly what I will continue to do unapologetically.”