The Kate Middleton Photoshop scandal has made me feel old

And so has my birthday, tbf

This weekend my birthday and Mother’s Day fell on the same day. Here’s an excellent picture of me enjoying this double celebration, accurately depicted by my six year old:

Here’s a close-up:

Accurate.

Under normal circumstances, I hate birthdays. I am Not a Birthday Person. It’s just something about the slow march towards death, and the uncomfortable reminder that yet another year has passed without me achieving anything of note, you know?

This year, however, I was rewarded, not just with that top I wanted from ZARA and this extremely excellent card from Max, but also by this photo of Kate Middleton, who, as you will recall, I’ve been somewhat unhealthily interested in since her “disappearance” shook the internet, in a week which coincided with me having nothing better to think about.

Almost as soon as the photo was published, people started finding “problems” with it. By the time I went to bed on Sunday night, AP, Reuters, and other photo agencies had pulled it from circulation, and, the next day, Kate (I can call her that because of my parasocial relationship with her…) was forced to issue an apology, admitting that she’d edited it. Naturally, the internet went into meltdown, with renewed assertions that Kate must be dead, and that, as well as getting someone to pose as her in a car the previous week, Kensington Palace had now faked a photo of her, AND started tweeting on her behalf.

Best birthday ever, or what?

The thing that surprised me most about all of this, though, wasn’t the indisputable fact that the photo had been edited (I mean, it’s a photo of three kids all apparently standing still AND looking at the camera, with no one pulling a face or pretending to be Skibbidi Toilet: it would be more surprising if it wasn’t edited…), but rather people’s reaction to the idea that the photos we see on the internet might have been edited.

Did… did you not all know that already?

Maybe I’m just unforgivably cynical, but I tend to assume that every ‘official’ photo I see (and the vast majority of ‘unofficial’ ones, too) has been edited to some extent, even if it’s just to enhance the lighting, or increase the saturation or whatever. I mean, I’ve been blogging since 2006, and I don’t think I’ve EVER posted a photo directly from the camera, without at least bumping the brightness and reducing the shadows a bit. (Look, I live in Scotland, OK? If I didn’t adjust the lighting on my photos, you wouldn’t be able to see me in them…)

“But the Princess could NEVER,” people confidently proclaimed, as if Kate had pulled off some kind of world class deception, rather than simply clone-stamping the sleeve of a cardigan. “AS IF Kate could do THAT! Kate! No, something is definitely going on!”

Which just goes to show: some people literally find it easier to believe that the Princess of Wales is dead/getting divorced/has run off with The Unknown, than that a woman might be able to use Photoshop. And this is pretty wild to me, really, because — brace yourselves for this, folks — I, too, can use Photoshop. Quite well, actually. In fact, given the reaction to the idea of Kate Middleton being able to use it, I’m guessing that a lot of people who know/follow me would be absolutely astonished to know how well I can use Photoshop. And I’m not even a “keen amateur photographer,” or however Kate’s describing herself these days: I’m just someone who lives on the internet and has learned to use the various tools I have at my disposal to make my photos look a bit better.

Which, according to Threads, is ‘kinda adorable’ of me, really…

Not just a woman, but an OLDER woman. Using a photo editing program that has probably been around since before these kids were even born. CAN YOU EVEN? As a woman who is even older than Kate Middleton, and who’s been using tools like Photoshop for almost her entire working life, I am incensed by the casual misogyny and ageism on display here. (I am also kinda adorable, though, so there’s that…)

“This is the worst birthday ever,” I thought, miserably scrolling X. “Because this is the one where I’m SO OLD that I’m deemed incapable of using the tools of my own trade. How am I even holding this phone? What’s an ‘internet’?”

Pass me my smelling salts and summon the horseless carriage to take me to the grave, please.

Existential crisis aside, though, the idea that photo editing is some kind of highly-technical dark art which is rarely undertaken by anyone other than The Professionals (And CERTAINLY not by a woman old enough to be a mother…), and then only for highly nefarious reasons, is a new one on me. Y’all seriously never over-used the ‘Clarendon’ filer on Insta? Or gone in and adjusted the brightness and contrast? You’ve never felt a bit ‘artsy, idk’? Why are we pretending to think Photoshop is super-complicated, and that there are no easier alternatives to it either, perhaps in the form of image editing apps so simple my 6-year-old could use them?

Why, though?

The fact that an image has been edited doesn’t necessarily mean that sOmEtHiNg iS gOiNg On, either. When I looked at the ‘Kate and Kids’ photo in the wake of the ‘Charlotte’s Cardigan’ scandal, I just thought, “Oh, they probably didn’t get a shot where they were all looking at the camera, so they stitched a few together.” I still think this is the most likely explanation. I mean, there are phone cameras that literally do this for you now, taking a selection of group photos and swapping out the faces so everyone looks their best. Which honestly seems like a pretty good idea to me, speaking as that one person who always manages to have their eyes closed in a group shot, but the person who took it looks good, so they’re going to post it anyway.

(In almost every indoor group shot that includes me, the flash on the camera phone bounces off my pale blue skin, and I literally look like I’m haunting the group. I swear to God, in years to come someone will unearth some of those photos and use them as evidence of ghosts. This is why I always try to hide at the back of group photos. And why you should never use the flash on your phone. But I digress…)

In my previous life as a fashion blogger, I had the misfortune of having to look at literally thousands of photos of myself. Maybe even tens of thousands. And I’m here to tell you that the camera lies. I’ve seen photos of myself in which I looked like I had only one leg, or as if both of my feet were on backwards. Photos which you’d swear were Photoshopped, because it looks like I’m levitating, or there’s something in the background that doesn’t look exactly like you’d expect it to. A lot of the time it’s just a trick of the light, or the angle the shot was taken from, but most of the time these things can be explained by the fact that a photograph represents the tiniest fraction of a second frozen in time; the camera literally sees things the human eye does not. So most people who spend any time at all creating photos for public consumption will edit them to some degree; not necessarily to deceive the person who’ll see it (although there are obviously plenty of people who do it for exactly that reason, let’s not kid ourselves here…), but often just to get rid of those weird anomalies that you probably wouldn’t notice (or which wouldn’t even be there) in real life.

In my case, I edit pretty much all of my photos to make them lighter and brighter. I used a Lightroom filter on the birthday card photo at the top of this page, for instance, because it was taken indoors, in low light, and what the camera captured was not actually what I saw.

Other things I’ve used Photoshop for:

• Removing an overflowing rubbish bin from the background of a photo.

• Removing random passers-by/their vehicles from the background of photos.

• Removing stray hairs/pieces of fluff/mysterious stains from my clothes.

• Smoothing out a lock of hair that appeared to be sticking out of my head like a horn on a windy day.

• Taking hair out of my face.

• Removing a bruise from my leg.

• Tidying up nail polish in close-ups of my hands.

• Taking out street signs or other identifying details.

• Adding multiple versions of myself to a photo, to create a ‘hilarious’ composite where it looked like there were loads of me.

(Interestingly, any time I posted photos like the last example, which were actively drawing attention to the fact that it was Photoshop, I’d always get comments from people telling me what a great job ‘my husband’ had done, and how great ‘he’ was at photo editing. There were some occasions where I had to call on Terry to do something for me, because there’s no denying, he is much better than I am at this kind of stuff¹, but the majority of the time it was me being just too adorable…)

And that’s all just off the top of my head. If I thought about it, I’d be able to name many, many more ways I’ve used Photoshop (or other editing programs: I actually mostly use Lightroom these days…) on the photos posted on my blog and Instagram. I don’t think this type of editing is particularly unusual, and nor do I think it’s massively ‘deceptive’, either.

That lock of hair that’s being blown into my face by the wind in a particular photo isn’t ALWAYS there, for instance; in fact, one second later, it would’ve been gone — as would the random passer-by I removed to protect their privacy. The fact that you can’t see the Coke can or dog poop on the footpath I’m standing on for a fashion shoot is neither here nor there, really; sure, if the point of the photo was to demonstrate the lack of litter in my local area, that would be a different matter. But in a photo designed to show you my new shoes? Struggling to see why you’d care that I removed a piece of litter, tbh.

Things I Have Never Used Photoshop For:

• Making people think I’m alive when I am, in fact, dead.

• Putting my head onto someone else’s body.

• Making myself look taller/thinner/prettier.

• Protecting the monarchy from allegations of abuse.

• To get back at my husband for having an affair with the Marchioness of Cholmondeley by releasing badly-edited photos containing a series of cryptic ‘clues’ that all is not well.

I think it’s likely that the Princess of Wales hasn’t used it for any of those reasons either, tbh. I know it’s a bit of a blow, because it’s been a long winter, and God knows we could all be doing with a bit of scandal to get us through until Spring, but it seems obvious to me that Kate has actually just moved to a small town in Vermont, where she’s planning to open a bookshop/florist/cake shop and fall in love with a rugged and yet sensitive farmer type, who just gets her the way no one ever has before, and who will help her understand the true meaning of Christmas. And if she hasn’t, then I certainly hope someone, somewhere is writing a book in which a Princess does do that, because I, for one, would read it.

All of which is to say, of course, that literally nothing of note has happened this week. Terry still has Bell’s Palsy . Max is still obsessed with airplanes. I’m still old, but adorable. It’s still cold, and rainy, and a long way from summer. If you, too, are as bored as I am with all of this, however, the good news is that you can currently download my first two books (plus a bunch of others) for FREE by visiting this page, and following the instructions there. And, if that’s not enough for you, there are even more free ebooks to download here.

Happy reading! Please come and share your hot takes about the Princess of Wales, the Duchess of Cholmondeley, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and whatever else you fancy in the comments, so I don’t have to get on with writing my book…

Until next week,

P.S. If you like romcoms in which slightly awkward women end up with implausibly rich and handsome men, my author newsletter is here:

1. Not because he’s a MAN, just because he’s a graphic designer, and so has spent a lot more time on PS than I have…