Dear polish-makers, dear bloggers,
I’ve wanted
to get this off my chest for quite a while now, and today is the day.
It’s a well
known fact that indie-makers and bloggers go together hand in hand. The
indie-makers make pretty polishes and us bloggers display them on our blogs.
Sometimes we get the polishes for free in return for a review, most of the time we
buy them ourselves. Fact is that our blogs are a huge display of pretties,
just wanting their ten minutes of fame.
There’s
nothing wrong with that.
What really
bugs me is that so few want to show the true colours of the polishes, so to
speak. Many are the times where I’ve fallen in love with a polish on a blog,
bought it, only to find out that it doesn’t at all look like the pictures I’ve
just seen on my monitor. Photoshop and similar enhancers, ladies, are not
really your friends, but sneaky tricksters who want to blow your cover and show
you up as a visual teller of untruths. Then people who read your blogs stop
liking you so much, and treat what you say, and show, with a well earned
measure of distrust and disbelief. Catch me once, sure, go ahead - but you
won’t do it twice. Credibility is fairly hard to achieve, so easy to lose.
It’s not
just enhancing of colours and changing of colour depth and god knows what else
tricks some girls use to make the polish prettier. It’s also the fact that so
many girls chose not to show what a polish looks like in natural lighting.
Everybody knows that a holo looks great in the sun and I obviously want to see
that too. But I spend way more time indoors than I do in the sun, so I want at
least one picture of what the polish looks like in indoor environment. Is that
too much to ask?
I saw a
beautiful polish in a Facebook group. It looked fantastic, and the holo flame
was adorable. I asked if anybody had a photo of it in lower lights and the
girls snorted! Why would I want to see that? There were already beautiful
pictures of the polish! And there were. I bought the polish, and it looks
adorable in the sunshine. It doesn’t look good on me at all in lower lights, it
turns out that it’s not my colour. What a waste of $11 plus postage!
So: Dear
indie-makers, dear bloggers. Please don’t let your egos come in the way. Please
show us what the polishes really look like, not how they should look in your
head. That would be honest advertising!
Thanks for
taking the time to read this ♥
You make some great points! I'm going to have to make sure I add some indoor lighting pics to my holo swatches too. :-)
ReplyDeleteThank you, I am super pleased to hear that :)
DeleteI so agree! I've got lots of polishes in my stash which I would have never bought if I had seen indoor/lowlight pictures before buying, out of lightboxes, no fancy background/lighting etcetera. All these polishes stay in my stash after one try because I'm so dissapointed. All that money could have stayed on my savingsaccount...... Or spend on really beauti-polishes! Nowadays I spend lots of time to find a 'true' picture before buying, but sometimes it's hard to find one. That includes purple shades (most look more purple in pictures but turn out to lean to blurple irl. I prefer the reddish/berry purplish shades, so huge dissapointment!), glitter, holo and multi/duochrome polishes.
ReplyDeleteI've got my part of disappointing polishes as well. I do try and re-home them, but yes, it's a waste of money, and I hate wasting money.
DeleteI do understand that it can be difficult to capture the exact colour of a polish, but then at least state it in the post, like: "my pictures show this as red-ish purple, but in real life it's more... blabla..." :) That's honesty and I like that!
Exactly. And as you state below a few times, I really don't mind editing, but I want to see the real life colour as much as possible. If that's hard (purple polishes), then please add some words about it in the description.
DeletePurple can be really tricky, I don't know why it pretends to be blue on photographs :D
DeleteYou are absolutely right! It is so important to show the real colormofa nail polish. Some pictures do look great - but in reality the polish is so different! I used to always took a extra pic in the shade in summer. Sadly it's usually so dark here in winter I can't take a shade picture anymore. But will try more often!
ReplyDeleteThe weather sucks here too, but the most important thing for me is to see a "real" picture. If I want to look at art I'll visit an art galary, not a nail blog. I think your pictures are great! :)
DeleteThank you! Yeah, I don't like pictures which look great but don't even show a bottle.
DeleteHere, here, great post hun! x
ReplyDeleteThank you, sweetie! x
DeleteYou are so right - but I wonder how many bloggers deliberately enhances polishes?!
ReplyDeleteI try the best to make the colors true - and that very often DOES require editing tools, so they are my friends I'm afraid.
Secondly my monitor is color calibrated with a real software - not just the built in one. But still it requires that the viewer sees it on a monitor showing the color correctly.
Thirdly I always describe the color and holo effect in words – also when Blogger changes my pink colors, which is very frustrating, Blogger makes them way more vivid, but it’s out of my hands…
So if a color editing tool isn't used if required the color will be shown wrongly, and that is IMO just as bad as editing.
No matter what - I don't think we ever get true photos on all blogs, it requires a lot of the blogger, the camera etc. etc.
When I search for a polish before I buy, I if at all possible I always seek more swatches - and in my head I add and subtract in my head LOL - but still there is no guarantee the polish I buy will look like I thought...
What makes me grumpy in all of this is when the shop owners use photos they know aren’t true – but they use them because the polish looks so incredibly beautiful....
I have unfollowed a number of bloggers who definitely enhance or change the colours of the polishes.
DeleteI'm not against Photoshop/other editing programmes as a rule - I know that it's sometimes necessary to change the hue and stuff - but only to make the polish look colour accurate. Like: Cameras like to show purples as blues, and it's good to change the settings so the picture actually shows what colour the polish really is.
I've had a polish sent for a review - and when I compared the pictures I took (which I thought was colour accurate) with the pictures another girl took and the pictures in the shop, I didn't believe it was the same polish. Seriously, that's so wrong!
If it's not that pretty to begin with, then change the polish and make it pretty! In real life - not on the pictures only :)
Well, then we agree :)
DeleteI agree with you, all of words are true <3
ReplyDeleteThank you, sweetness <3
DeleteMaria said:
ReplyDelete-I try the best to make the colors true - and that very often DOES require editing tools-
I sometimes do it too - to make the colours true - because my camera in macro mode often makes real colours of nail polishes lighter than they really are. But I always want to show holos in the shade - and I always show them like that. Some photos are just too beautiful on the net ;) so I understand your frustration. I haven't bought indie nail polishes from abroad but the situation does happen with some photos on the net I've seen and bought and they didn't look oh-so-beautiful ;)
I don't mind that bloggers make the colours true. I mind that they make them something they're not.
DeleteI like the way you take your pictures in different lightings, it totally works for me, thank you :)
I'm glad you like the light - actually I think my camera makes polishes look worse :D
DeleteGood post and I agree. I do find it hard to get outdoor photos so most of my photos are indoors with my lighting - Scottish weather isn't great!!! I always try to capture what I see with my eyes - my husband sometimes helps me with his fancy camera too. He's an expert LOL ;-)
ReplyDeleteIf you are selling the polish, you really need to show it how it is. Or you get people annoyed and you lose the return business.
What annoys me, is when I'm searching for a polish and the photos don't do it justice. For example iridescent polishes (you know I'm a huge fan) and people don't show off the shift at all in their photos :-| and when I wear it, the shift is REALLY easy to photograph and I'm glad I bought it! I wonder how many good polishes I've missed out on because of poor photos or lazy photos.
Here is another example. Not indie but China Glaze. I read about the promos for the Sea Goddess collection and I was excited. Thought I'd wait for the swatches though. Then I saw them - the polishes look awful and terrible. Then I happened to stumble on someones post about them - they looked amazing. I cannot remember who it was unfortunately :-( and after seeing her swatches I bought them and so glad I did - they look amazing in real life and I love them :-D
I get really annoyed when I see pictures in indie shops that look much better than the polishes actually do. Also the colour descriptions - I still remember that series of polishes I got where the colours were described really weird: The one that was supposed to be purple was grey, the wine red was pink, it was really odd. It doesn't make me want to shop there ever again.
DeleteI hadn't thought of it the other way around to be honest, but that's a bummer too. I try to look up several swatches before I buy but some polishes don't have a lot of swatches up unfortunately.
I think your photos are great :)
To quote Benjamin Franklin "Glass, China and reputation are easily cracked and never mended well". And in the short term it may se very enticing to post the prettiest photos of a nail polish on a blog it will ultimately come back to bite you. One of the main reasons I follow this blog is that it shows what polishes look like indoors, under artificial light. Even though I live in Australia about about half a k from the beach like everyone one else I spend most of my time indoors so that shot really matters to me. Descriptions also really matter to me. As for websites with inaccurate photos like you guys I vote with my wallet. Recently I stopped buying from one of my favorite indie manufacturers because the swapped their accurate but less than perfect photos for some very slick but highly photo shopped ones and I felt duped.
ReplyDeleteVoting with the wallet is a great thing in my opinion - it's a language that all retailers understand.
DeleteI was asked by a retailer if I thought a certain polish was just as pretty as the pictures suggested, and I said no. The particular blogger definitely enhances the colours a lot, so I said no, and I turned out to be right. The polish was still pretty - but not that pretty.
Even though I'm not familiar with indie polishes at all I feel like this is very well said!
ReplyDeleteThank you :)
DeleteIt's sometimes hard to show the true color of a polish but I usually state in the text if I don't think the color is accurate. Some blogs are so obvious that they edit their photos way to much. It simply looks to perfect. I will try to get better on showing the polish in different lights.
ReplyDeleteI know it can be tricky to catch the accurate colour, and it's nice that you actually tell in the post if it's not. And I agree - there is such a thing as too perfect in this world too :)
DeleteThis is so important to talk about, because as a blogger I really want to show the polish as beautiful as I can, and without any editing, because I'm not good at that. But sometimes I got jealuóus at other bloggers that I think take such beautiful photos of polishes, but when I bought a polish that they've shown it really looks different as you say. Not so fun, so I do agree with you. It's just that my ego sometimes want's to take more beautiful photos, but on the other hand I do want to show the polish as it really is. Great post! <3
ReplyDeleteI totally understand why the ego can come in the way. But it's possible to take beautiful pictures without actually making the polish prettier than it is. If we make it prettier then we're no better than the fashion industry that makes us want to be what we can never be.
DeleteThank you so much for your input! <3
Yeah, this is really a tough subject! You're totally right about showing the true color of the polishes and the shade/artificial lighting picture of a holo. I'm usually checking on google pictures (swatches from different bloggers) before I buy a polish because I know how hard it is to show the "true" shade of a polish due to the light source, the camera, the monitor used for editing, my monitor that I'm viewing the picture on etc. When I choose a polish I'm usually prepared for some surprises :D
ReplyDeleteHahaha yeah, well the upside of too much photoshopping can be that you're always in for a surprise, I didn't think of that :D
DeleteI love your pictures, I think they're great!
Well said sweetie, well said....
ReplyDeleteThank you :)
Delete