Alleged GQ Photoshop Disaster features Lindsay Lohan's Mighty Morphin' belly button

Following in BoingBoing's noble tradition of bringing truth and justice to sloppy Photoshop jobs in fashion magazines, our reader Nicole posts this truthy exposé and says,

The current issue of the German GQ Magazine features Lindsay Lohan and a magically moving belly button. On the cover shot she has no navel, then in the spread her belly button moves from an abnormally high position to a somewhat natural one. In the end she just looks like a plastic barbie doll. Oh, and I don't show it in the blog post, but I believe her ankle monitor is photoshopped out of some other pics in the spread.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Nelson.C

How bizarre. Looking at some candid pictures of Lohan, her navel does seem a bit high anyway, certainly high enough that the high-waisted panties in the cover shot wouldn’t cover it, but why would the digital retoucher have moved it in the bow-and-arrow picture?

What decides where the navel is on the belly? It does seem to float around from person to person.

Irony corner: the site I found the candid pictures on runs those “Cartoonize yourself” ads quite prominently.
OrcOnTheEndOfMyFork

De-tach-able bellybutton~
Nelson.C

Ah, I think I have part of the answer: Lohan has a navel piercing. Maybe they edited it out for the German market, replacing it with somebody else’s and doing a poor job of placement.
- Xeni Jardin
  
  Ah, very good sleuthing, Nelson! That very likely explains it.
soongtype

Thanks for continuing to report on these. I find it disturbing that the media is trying to create an unattainable flawless beauty. Not even our supermodels are good enough. At some point we’re just going to have 3D models.
James

Did anyone else notice the horror that is Britney Spears horribly photoshopped head onto her/another model’s body on the *cover* of the latest cosmo? *shudder*
jerwin

Who doesn’t have a belly button? (BBC)
irksome

A few more breast augmentations and tummy-tucks and her navel will be on her freaking forehead.

Pity that; she used to be a good looking chick. Now she’s a walking billboard for cosmetic surgery gone horribly awry.

And alcohol does horrible damage to ones face, don’t it?
- Xeni Jardin
  
  Irksome,
  
  This isn’t a forum for bashing Ms. Lohan, we’re just observing bad photoshoppery here.
  
  Don’t be cruel here, please.
  - social_maladroit
    
    Don’t be cruel here, please.
    
    Wait, no one stopped people from making very cruel remarks about the way Lindy Matsko (the VP of the Lower Merion School district, of spycam fame) looked when her picture was posted here. And she wasn’t modeling.
    
    GQ paid Ms. Lohan for pictures of her scantily-clad (or in the case of the picture with the guitar, nude) body, with the (roughly translated) headline, “On the beach with the girl who excited the world”. Sounds like fair game to me.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Commenters in that thread were remarking about the look on her face, not how her face looks.
Anonymous

THERE IS NO PHOTOSHOP DISASTER HERE!
Her belly button is really high!
Just google some pics of here and you’ll see.
Here’s a sample:
http://blogs.ajc.com/jeff-schultz-blog/files/2009/02/lindsay_lohan2.jpg
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Her belly button is really high!
  
  High as in the back of her head? Look at the picture in the floral bathing suit.
- Felton
  
  Her belly button is high? Isn’t that a violation of her probation?
- doingsitups
  
  Holy ****! and I thought people were ignorant of naval position, she has a high navel! Freaky.
fnc

Vat-grown Lindseys don’t have belly buttons.
mjfgates

Ms. Lohan’s belly button moves up and down about ten centimeters? *I* can do that… just grab my beer gut by the sides and start wobbling it up and down.

Admittedly, I’m a touch heavier than she seems to be.
Felton

I’m going to feel really bad if it turns out she suffers from wandering belly button syndrome.
- BookGuy
  
  You’re going to feel even worse when her belly button detaches itself again and comes after you seeking vengeance.
  - Felton
    
    Now that’s the stuff of nightmares.
Anonymous

Bellybuttons? Disgusting! I’m glad someone finally is doing something about it!
nixiebunny

What’s with the “Alleged” in the post title? Is it that you’re not sure if they used Photoshop or the GIMP to do the work?

The visual facts speak for themselves.

how about “Lindsey Lohan’s belly button appears to have grown legs.”
Kenneroo

It is my observation that in the cover she is leaning forward with the camera high and with the arrow she is leaning backward with the camera low. There may be some photoshop but I dont see it with the navel.
mausium

How do these stupid fucks get a job in fashion?

Really, even if you’re not attracted to women, chances are that you came out of one and know how they look. Unless it’s some wolf-boy retoucher.
kingfelix

I am more surprised over this being featured on Boing Boing than the retouching. If I wanted to read about these breaking news I would head over to the E! website.
Nollie

Hello, Nicole here. I am not an expert in photoshop, I was just looking at the spread and felt like something looked off. I don’t necessarily think they were photoshopping her belly button, perhaps they were elongating her torso, or legs which throws off the proportions of her whole body. If you look at the last photo I posted, it seems like she is a little softer than the other images, I think they were tweaking her body to make it leaner in the first two which resulted in the belly button looking oddly placed. The cover image was the one that initially caught my eye because if she is high waisted, then her belly button should be showing.

It’s true perspective definitely plays a role in all of this, and perhaps it really is the angles. However, the frequency of photoshopped images in mainstream media begs the viewer to question the veracity of what is shown. To pretend like these images weren’t touched up is absurd, of course they were, the point is to think about how photography functions in this situation. Is the purpose to display a true depiction of a celebrity, or an image that functions as a “painted” portrait of a celebrity? An illustrated portrayal of a person is certainly nothing new to magazines, media, or fashion, however, I feel like the ambiguity of images like these is misleading to the audience. It is one thing to touch up hair frizzies, an odd shadow or small imperfections, however it seems like significantly altering a person’s silhouette crosses an unspoken line.

A question to you all – how do you feel about altered images? Would you be okay with it if you felt like it was made clear that you were looking at an idealized form instead of externalized plastic surgery?
- Felton
  
  Good points, and interesting questions. I suppose I’ve always taken it for granted that images of celebrities are going to be touched up to be more flattering. It doesn’t bother me any more than anything else done in the name of marketing. But it is a bit strange to look at an image of someone and not be 100% sure everything you’re seeing is real. On the other hand, it can be very amusing to see a professional touch-up job completely backfire when it goes just a little too far.
  
  Thanks for bringing us the conversation piece, by the way. I hope my relentless “movable belly button” jokes didn’t bring down the discourse too much. They were meant towards the photoshop job, not Lindsay.
Anonymous

And in related news, porn viewers were shocked to discover that video editors had removed genital warts from the private parts of their favorite stars.
Lobster

Oh no no no, her posture is all wrong. That’s not how you shoot a bow.
- Nelson.C
  
  Is that a bow? It looks like a coutourier’s bizzaro dream of a bow. Could it possibly work without breaking? Honestly, any hunter-gatherer from the last 20,000 years would be laughed out of the tribe if he turned up with such an object.
  
  Shoot? That is not how you make a bow.
arikol

The poor work done by professional photo editors really amazes.
But let’s not forget that for every one disaster like this there are a thousand brilliantly edited pictures. Not that I really agree with editing people this much. Nothing wrong with being natural (with little wrinkles, normal fat, imperfect skin and all that).

As for “allegedly photoshopped”.. Even Lindsey’s unhealthy habits are unlikely to make the belly button jump up or down by ten centimetres.
Felton

I have no problem with the way she looks, and I do think she has some talent, based on The Parent Trap and Mean Girls, but this belly button thing suggests that she may be a shape-shifting alien, and they are not to be trusted.
- Phikus
  
  Don’t lend her the UFO for a spin. Just sayin’.
  - Felton
    
    Definitely not! I could never live with myself if I loaned her the UFO and she crashed it into the international space station.
- nehpetsE
  
  She might have been human once. but all that’s left now is a navel-less husk.
Anonymous

The real truth is staring you right in the face, but you refuse to accept it: There are at least 3 Lindsays.

Lindsay Mark I is the original with high belly button
Lindsay Mark II is the first clone and no bb
Lindsay Mark III is a later version with a normal looking bb.

Unfortunately, there is only 1 brain to share amongst the 3. Thus all the crazy behavior.

I rest my case. Good day!
Anonymous

Baby, if I made you mad
For something I might have said,
Please, lets forget the past,
The future looks bright ahead,
Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true.
I don’t want no other love,
Baby it’s just you I’m thinking of.
theawesomerobot

Hey GQ, if you’re ever looking for a competent retoucher to help avoid photoshop disasters, let me know.
EH

I was thinking for sure the motivation was to make her underwear appear to be lower-cut than it is.
Anonymous

Wait… Tuckels….

How could you tell that someone had no belly button while standing at a bus stop? Was this a bus stop in a nudist colony??? I’m genuinely curious.
nehpetsE

“OMG! SHE HAS NO NAVEL! That means The alien navel parasite is loose in this very room!!!
Aright everybody. Show me your fucking belies right now. I am not screwing around here.
Anyone who doesn’t lift their shirt, gets shot.”
- tuckels
  
  I saw a girl at a bus stop without a navel of any sort once. Navels aren’t the kind of thing I tend to notice, but it was really striking.
- Felton
  
  My navel is exactly where it should be. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
EscapingTheTrunk

In an alternate universe, the parade of Photoshop disasters is some sort of cultural statement about unattainable perfection, part of a secret agenda on the part of magazine employees to gently awaken the dominant culture from its cognitive beauty sleep.

In this universe, it’s just another example of why Adobe should just institute a certification program, already, so magazines would know who to hire. I’ve come to look at magazine images as special effects, and when I understand them as such I’m less indignant. Magazine!Lindsay isn’t real, and neither is Bruce the Shark or Treebeard. I shouldn’t expect Lindsay (or anyone) to look that way in real life any more than I should expect Robert Pattinson to sparkle. But Photoshop disasters are the equivalent of the rubber suits from the original Star Trek. They’re shoddy effects in the service of a false reality that we all recognize as unreachable from our own. I’m prepared to accept these images as design fiction, but at this point somebody should call Mike, Crow, and Tom Servo to evaluate some of them.
nico_forgot

I think that the high waisted brief she’s wearing on the cover is high enough, given her pose, to be over her navel.

The one on the inside – with the bow? Not so much.
nico_forgot

@EscaoingTheTrunk: I prefer Joel to Mike :) but miss them both.
HeatherB

I’ve never been able to find my dogs belly buttons. Maybe somebody photoshoped them.
Anonymous

I saw the side view of this photoshoot and they really photoshopped her. her gut was hanging out and she looked awful.
anansi133

Maybe she’s beta-testing the next plastic surgery trend?

Think of the shots as before, during, and after. They didn’t mess up the ‘shoppage, they messed up the sequence.
Nelson.C

Comparing this candid photo with this photo from GQ, measuring the distance from neathage (look it up) to crotch and the distance from neathage to navel, I found that the ratio in each photo to be 3.6 (to 2 sig. fig.). So, assuming the candid photo has been unaltered, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Lohan has a high navel and its position has not been altered in the bow-and-arrow picture.

That’s not to say that the GQ picture is unaltered, of course. Either the navel piercing or the scar from it has been edited out. And, if you examine the bow string you can see a little wiggle where it crosses her bikini top when it should be taut and straight, which leads me to think that her breasts have been touched up, distorting the string. Plus, her freckles are nearly invisible and her skin has a golden glow, which might be down to photography or photoshopping.

Meanwhile, the position of Lohan’s navel in the other two photos is still problematic. The one in the lattice-work swimsuit seems to be too low â€” I haven’t measured it since her crotch isn’t visible â€” and the one in the cover shot is just invisible, so without barely a doubt her navel has been photoshopped in both of these pictures.

This is way too much analysis for such a trivial issue, but I tell myself that it’s good practice. For what, I don’t know.
doingsitups

That girl is too cute and too dumb for her own good.

For everyone who thinks her navel in that picture is natural, just go to Wikipedia and look up, well something, anything, so you might sound less ignorant.
BookGuy

As someone who works in publishing (books, not glossy mags), what always amazes me about these is that even for a higher ed textbook, which will have a MUCH less smaller print run, at least four or five people review the cover before they go out. Presumably at least that many review a cover for one of these high-circulation mags, let alone the photo spreads, so MULTIPLE people had to say, “Hm, no bellybutton here. That works for me,” and “Oh, here her bellybutton is at the top of her sternum. Hawt!”
- Nelson.C
  
  A navel is an easy thing to miss, especially if you’re not looking to see if it’s missing, because it’s not normally going to be missing. Well, up until photoshopping became de riguer. Now that editorial is insisting that photography becomes illustration or even caricature they have to learn how to look critically at photoshopped pictures for blunders like this.
social_maladroit

Yes, comments calling her “Skeletor” and “a zombie” were all about the look on her face, rather than how her face looked.

Heh. You do come up with some catchy retorts.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Did it occur to you to flag the offending comments instead of saving up your indignation for future use?
  - social_maladroit
    
    Did it occur to you to flag the offending comments instead of saving up your indignation for future use?
    
    Thought that’s why they hired mods.
    
    Seriously, not only are you good at catchy retorts (“saving up your indignation for future use” – I like that), you’re also good at changing the subject. Look, it’s your blog. You’re welcome to whatever (double) standards you like.
- cjp
  
  Please, everyone calm down. Can’t you see that this is exactly what she wants? The fighting, the rage, the throwing drinks at each other… We have to stick together here and not succumb to The Lohan!
frankieboy

Lindsay, her belly button, and my Johnson!
(I’d use it to pick the lock on her ankle monitor, ala’ Barnacle Bill) Arrrrghhhhh!
Anonymous

no bellybutton? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qODyeZGLrZA