Once upon a time, in a place called Myspace, I wanted to put up some pics of me and my friend on my page. Prior to that, the friend told me, “please don’t put any unflattering pics of me on your page, I want to see them first.” Huh? As if I had Photoshop to do some retouching and such. Moving on…. 

So when I first saw Ciara on the cover of Vibe Magazine, I thought, “nothing new, Vibe has done this before with other celebrities (Keyshia Cole, Foxy Brown, Toni Braxton, they were topless)” and kept it moving. Time to push the envelope a bit, right? But Ciara is really not happy at all with the cover and even went as far as to say that they “airbrushed her clothes off”. Now look, I have heard of taking someone’s head and putting it on someone else’s body, but to airbrush someone’s clothes off? Really?

“I walked into the Vibe photo shoot very excited about making an artistic expression,” she said. “And when I saw the photos, I was a little bothered because the photos appear as if I was nude, and I wasn’t nude. I reached out to [Smith] — I sent her a letter — and I was a little upset, too, in the fact that she didn’t respond to me, and that happened prior to me reading her quote on the Internet. That definitely bothered me, just because of the fact that I wasn’t nude. I walked into the photo shoot to do an artistic photo shoot, so I was excited about that. I just didn’t like the fact that I saw the picture and now, stuff is gone.”

To which Danyel Smith, editor of Vibe said:

“I’m actually really sad,” Smith said. “Almost any photo you see on the cover of Vibe or any magazine is airbrushed [to some degree]. What I was thinking of doing, actually, was releasing the untouched photos [on Vibe's] Web site, so people can see what the hullabaloo is all about. I have so much respect for Ciara, and Ciara was so happy when she pitched this idea to us, and the photos are actually striking and beautiful. It was pitched to me in a way that it was time [for her] to grow up and be beautiful and be free and be all the things she wanted to be.” (source)

I mean, the pics were pretty tasteful, right? Riiiight?

I’m all for retouching and everything, but again, how do you airbrush all of someone’s clothes off? I want that program then if that’s the case!