Pics: A biracial woman Photoshopped in 18 countries

Photos / Che Landon, Priscilla Yuki Wilson

A woman has taken it upon herself to show how conventional standards of beauty are shifted when a biracial identity is involved.

Journalist Priscilla Yuki Wilson, who is half-Japanese and half-African American, sent a photo of herself to editors in various countries across the world in a bid to see how they would use Photoshop to make it beautiful according to their cultural standards.

She found that in contrast to similar projects in the past that have resulted in a huge variety of changes, people seemed to be at a loss as to how to improve her unique face.

In some cases, her African features were emphasized and her Asian ones erased, and in other cases the editors apparently created entirely new features to counter her racial ambiguity.

Priscilla was inspired after seeing the results journalist Esther Honig had when she asked 40 people in 25 different countries to "make her look beautiful" with the help of Photoshop.

But when Priscilla did the same, the results were drastically different. "As a biracial woman there is no standard of beauty or mold that can easily fit my face," she writes on her blog. "I am living in a culture that's still adjusting to my kind of face."

Indeed, the edited versions of Priscilla's photo show just how much of a challenge the project seemed to be, with many countries hardly altering her at all, while others did so to an unrecognizable extreme.

In India, for instance, the Photoshop job is barely noticeable - just a slight lightening of her skin tone and her lips made a shade pinker.

India. Photo / Priscilla Yuki Wilson

And in Sweden her skin is given a dewy glow, and her brown eyes - edited to look a shade lighter than they are in real life - are lined in black eyeliner.

The countries that did the most digital editing went so far as to make her completely unrecognisable.

Slovenia, for example, thinned out her face significantly, shrunk her nose, thinned her lips, colored her eyes green and set them further apart, seemingly creating a whole new woman.

Slovenia. Photo / Priscilla Yuki Wilson

And one of the editors in the US went even more extreme by giving her long wavy extensions and bangs, dark red lipstick, bright green eyes and fuller, more upturned lips.

Another person in the US, however, hardly touched her picture, simply making her skin a more even tone and filtering the photo in a glowing light.

"In contrast to Honig's results, where her face became a canvas to express more than a dozen contrasting beauty standards, I found that my face actually challenged the application of Photoshop in this instance," writes Priscilla.

Thanks to her personal experience as a biracial woman, she fully expected the results of her project to be jarringly different to those of Ms Honig.

"I was taught that my natural self did not comply with conventional standards set forth by society, saying fairer skin is better, straighter hair is more attractive, and that skinny tastes good," she explains.

One of the more mind-boggling transformations was done by a picture editor in Mexico, who shrunk her head until it looked disproportionate to the rest of her body.

Mexico. Photo / Priscilla Yuki Wilson

She told Aplus.com: "In these images my Asian and African aesthetics are combined with Latina, Vietnamese and European features, either pigeon holing me into a more narrow racial understanding or reaching an entirely new level of racial ambiguity."

Algeria was apparently totally baffled as to how to make her beautiful, which resulted in her picture being made oddly transparent and given a pinkish tone.

And in Vietnam, Priscilla was transformed into a completely different person, with a much smaller, rounder face, almond-shaped eyes, a long neck, a skinnier nose and smaller lips.

Meanwhile, in Israel, she was simply given a lick of light blue eyeshadow, a smaller jaw and a slightly thinned nose.

Priscilla says she feels that her project is especially timely since the world is witnessing a massive growth in mixed-raced populations.

"It appears that the genetic makeup of our society is likely to continue to diversify further and further," she told Aplus.com. "And as one of those changing faces of America, I wanted to see how photo-shoppers would change (or not change) a "changing face".

She added that she hopes her photo series creates "a dialogue that specifically addresses race and ethnic features in an industry where beauty standards are apparently eurocentric."

Original:

Photo / Che Landon, photobyche.com

Algeria:

India:

Macedonia:

Mexico:

Montenegro:

Netherlands:

Pakistan:

Slovenia:

United Kingdom:

United States:

Vietnam:

- DAILY MAIL