Aishwarya Rai's New L'Oreal Ad: Too Much Photoshop?

Aishwarya Rai may be too preoccupied at home with daughter Aaradhya to take on any film work but she isn't letting motherhood stop her from earning her keep in the ad world. Aishwarya's latest ad, a print piece for L'Oreal's Hydrafresh Moisturizer, has just released in India, adding to her earlier L'Oreal shampoo ad which was released several months back.

Reaction to the ad has been mixed. Aishwarya looks as beautiful as ever but her appearance in the ad is decidedly...unrealistic. It's no great secret that Mrs. Bachchan has put on a good deal of weight recently thanks to her pregnancy, but her face (which is the only part of her which is visible in the ad) looks slim and young in the photo for L'Oreal.

The ad has been featured on several Indian entertainment programs, which have compared her current look to that in the ad. There are two explanations for the discrepancy in her look: either she shot the ad long before she became pregnant (her face in the ad is far slimmer than she was even in the months leading up to the announcement of her pregnancy, so in this scenario the ad would have had to have been shot more than a year ago, which seems unlikely) or the photo was photoshopped to an almost unbelievable degree.

Aishwarya has made her career on being known as "the most beautiful woman in the world" so it's unlikely that she'd allow an unflattering photo of herself to be run in magazines all over the country. But doesn't she also have a responsibility to be realistic? What kind of message do ads like this send to young women? Many countries have banned overly-photoshopped ads because they have been deemed unrealistic. Should ads such as Aishwarya's be banned as well?

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