Project shows beauty ideals around the world

Stan Schroeder

Images from Esther Honig's 'Before & After' series.

What does it mean to be beautiful?

To show how different countries have very different standards when it comes to beauty, journalist Esther Honig had her face photoshopped by people in 26 countries - and the results are stunningly disparate.

For the project, named "Before & After," Honig used freelancing platforms, such as Fiverr, to contract nearly 40 photoshop artists from countries like Ukraine, Kenya and Serbia.

Some of the artists were professionals, while others were amateurs. Honig's request to all of them was simple: "Make me beautiful."

"Photoshop allows us to achieve our unobtainable standards of beauty, but when we compare those standards on a global scale, achieving the ideal remains all the more illusive," explains Honig.

While some of the resulting images, like the one from Israel, show pretty subtle changes to the original photo, some (including both examples from the US) go very far, completely changing Esther's facial features.

See some of the images in below, and check out the entire gallery on Esther's website.