If touched up human models near (otherwise accurately portrayed) products constitutes fraud, then what about entirely animated characters? Is Chester Cheetah dangerously fraudulent? Did people think those frogs were actually selling Budweiser, or that drinking it would let them talk with frogs? Surely you won’t look like a chihuahua while eating Taco Bell, so by your theory and Jamil’s, would that constitute false advertising?

Those examples are ridiculous (and also illustrative of how long it has been since I paid attention to TV ads), but what about motion capture? If, say, Audi managed to get Andy Serkis to advertise their cars, would Gollum driving an A8 be fraudulent advertising? The motion capture, after all, would mean that he was as heavily “touched up” as is possible for an actor or model to be, without getting rid of the human entirely.

Casual claims that photographic touch-up is fraud seem to me quite estranged from actual legal definitions of fraud, which have a long history and are not easy to make. For example, a claim of fraud must surmount a threshold of materiality, which would dispose of most of the gripes here, and must go to the terms of the bargain, which means a complaint about prettifying a model would have a harder slog than, say, a complaint that a product itself was misrepresented. A claim of fraud is also ordinarily defeated by disclosure of the supposedly concealed fact, yet Jamil & Co. refuse to entertain disclosure as a fully adequate cure (I would recommend doing it as a click-through disclaimer: “I recognize and accept that photos on this site from any and all advertisers may include airbrushing of human subjects,” thanks bye.)

And flattering clothes. We should all wear grey pajamas, all the time.

I can’t believe ideas this obvious haven’t been tried already.

Air brushing is old technology. A trouble with attempting to regulate aesthetics through regulating technology, is that the technology keeps changing.

We are human–and imperfect, and when you give imperfect people freedom, some ill is going to result. So, in order to cure those ills, other imperfect people decide they want to be busybodies with a gun (I.e., the power of the state).

No thanks.