Too good to be real?

A quote from a photo retoucher for Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty has generated questions about how "real" any of the beauties actually were.

In the May 12 issue of the New Yorker, Pascal Dangin — photo retoucher for Annie Leibovitz, who created the Real Beauty ads for Dove and Ogilvy — said this with regard to the campaign:

"Do you know how much retouching was on that? But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone's skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive."

Advertising Age picked the story up Wednesday under the headline, "Dove's 'Real Beauty' Pics Could be Big Phonies." Leibovitz, Dangin and representatives for Dove immediately rose to defend the campaign's integrity.

"The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the [2005] Dove 'real women' ad. I only worked on the [2007 Dove Pro-Age] campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do color correction — both the integrity of the photographs and the women's natural beauty were maintained," Dangin stated, via Advertising Age.

"I did not mean to suggest that the women's shape, size, facial features or age were retouched," he added.

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty kicked off in 2004. It drew serious attention with the release of a video called "Evolution," where an ordinary woman poses for an ad and is unrecognizably retouched by both makeup artists and photo editors.