Family

For every girl who has talked herself into starving so she can be "beautiful"…

For every woman who has had to listen to another woman tell her she's too frumpy, too fat, not glam enough …

And for every guy who got himself all hot 'n bothered over a supermodel's image — and then thought his girlfriend was plain — here's someone you should meet. His name is Pascal Dagin, and he's the most famous man in fashion we've never heard of.

Dagin works in a studio in New York City, where much of the broader world met him in a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine. He's a photographic retouch artist, by his account and any other. The major photographers — Annie Lebovitz among them — and celebrities won't allow one of their pictures to be published unless it passes through Dagin's hands.

Oh, say, you knew every photo in Vogue and every celeb headshot was "retouched?" You figured they airbrushed out moles, pimples and a few crow's feet?

"Retouched" means shaving inches from one actresses rear end for an almost-nude shot. And lengthening another woman's legs. Whittling a centimeter or two off of a forehead, jaw, chin and, at the same time, using a computer keyboard to stretch her neck into a graceful curve a swan would envy. And if her eyes are too small to be dramatic, a mouse click-and-drag will make them catlike, exotic and sultry.

As it turns out, even the 1 percent of the world gorgeous enough to model isn't actually as gorgeous as we're fooled into thinking they are. For an example of how a normal woman can bet turned into a billboard hottie, search out the Dove "evolution" video on YouTube. Prepare to be amazed.

Forward it to every teenaged girl or pre-teen girl you know.

Show her that the fashion world's reality is far more distorted than we mere mortals ever thought it was. Use it as a healthy way to put vanity, appearance and the shallow nature of physical beauty's pursuit in perspective.

As one 20-something put it: "It kind of makes you feel better. Even THEY don't look that good."

For teens and adolescent girls, Dagin and his profession have set a time bomb ticking. As technology gets keener, models go further beyond perfect. If they're too skinny — and their collarbones are too sharp to be attractive in an ad — those jutting skeletons are smoothed over. If a girl is so skinny her breasts have all but evaporated, or too young to have developed them in the first place, a retouch artist can make her look like a runaway Reubens model.

The real opportunity in meeting Dagin lies with people who fixate on appearances — either theirs or someone else's they'd like to change. For them, the introduction to Dagin's world should be an eye-opener. Or, in the case of some models' faces, an eye-enlarger.

Beauty really is in the eye of whoever beholds the right touch, the right computer program.

A certain type of smug vanity will always exist, much of it based around a determination to see how close some women can get to that swan-like ideal. Well, with Pascal Dagin at the mouse, Roseanne Barr could look like Marilyn Monroe. With smaller hips.