Speaking of pixels, The New Yorker just ran a story called "Pixel Perfect" about Pascal Dangin, the celebrity and fashion world's premier retoucher. He is the man responsible for creating the beyond reasonably gorgeous and perfect characters represented in glossy magazines and advertising by digitally altering their images, and some of the top people in the industry claim he's elevated the science to an art form.

Shall we form an angry mob?

In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore.

I thought Drew looked like she got some help in that photo!

Dangin is, by all accounts, an adept plumper of breasts and shrinker of pores. Using the principles of anatomy and perspective, he is able to smooth a blemish or a blip ("anomalies," he calls them) with a painterly subtlety.

Ah, I like that term for zits. As in, "Sorry, I woke up with a huge anomaly on my face this morning and I simply can't make it to work." And chances are, if you've ever picked up a fashion magazine, you've seen his work.

Vanity Fair, W, Harper's Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow's-feet and stray hairs. Dangin's company, Box Studios, has eighty employees and occupies a four-story warehouse in the meatpacking district.

I think this New Yorker article should be read in high schools far and wide. Impressionable young minds need to be aware that not even models and celebrities can live up to the impossibly high standards of "glamour." Oh, and that famous for breaking boundaries Dove campaign featuring all the so-called "real" women? Well, they were models, and not surprisingly, Dangin apparently had a hand in that pot too. Sigh.