Call it irony if you will, but a boudoir photographer has taken to Facebook to spread the message and importance of beauty sans photoshopping and airbrushing. Victoria Haltom of Victoria Caroline Boudoir from Texas, is spreading the message of a husband who wrote to her after receiving boudoir pictures of his wife, which were digitally altered.
Victoria says that many of her clients want to hide their ‘flaws’ and want their pictures retouched. A couple of years ago a 40-something woman asked Victoria to take her pictures and retouch them so that she would look flawless. She wanted to “spice things up” in her marriage.
“I want you to photoshop all of my cellulite, all of my angry red stretch marks, ALL of my fat, and all of my wrinkles….just make it go away. I want to feel gorgeous just once,” she said.
And Victoria did exactly that, changing poses, airbrushing here and there and come Christmas, the client gifted her husband with a very beautiful hand-tooled album containing 30 of these images.
“Three days later,” wrote Victoria in her Facebook post, “I receive this very REAL email…”
The man replied saying although the pictures were lovely, the woman in the pictures was not truly his wife.
“You made every one of her “flaws” disappear…and while I’m sure this is exactly what she asked you to do, it took away everything that makes up our life. When you took away her stretch marks, you took away the documentation of my children. When you took away her wrinkles, you took away over two decades of our laughter, and our worries. When you took away her cellulite, you took away her love of baking and all the goodies we have eaten over the years,” he wrote.
However, this was not an angry letter written by an irate husband. In fact what came next reduced us all to tears, including Victoria.
“I am not telling you all of this to make you feel horrible, you’re just doing your job and I get that. I am actually writing you to thank you. Seeing these images made me realize that I honestly do not tell my wife enough how much I LOVE her and adore her just as she is. She hears it so seldom, that she actually thought these photoshopped images are what I wanted and needed her to look like. I have to do better, and for the rest of my days I am going to celebrate her in all her imperfectness. Thanks for the reminder.”
Victoria was overwhelmed by the message in this letter. “This email was 100% real, and I cried like a baby with guilt for at least 6 months after that whenever I read it. I encourage you to embrace YOU just as you are!,” she wrote, signing off.
Tonight I want to tell you ladies about a time I messed up really badly. It was back when I first started boudoir, and…
Posted by Victoria Caroline Boudoir on Monday, October 12, 2015
Images via Victoria Caroline Boudoir
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