The Pressure To Be Perfect

It didn’t take long for the rumours to start. A dazzling, Hollywood smile, three adoring, beaming children with their arms entwined with their mother’s. If ever perfection could be captured with the click of a lens, it was the Princess of Wales’ family photograph, released on Sunday in honour of Mother's Day. It was perfect – until it wasn’t.

The public descended upon the photograph, and soon uncovered a catalogue of errors. Where was Kate’s - formerly Princess Diana’s - engagement ring? Why was Princess Charlotte’s sleeve so distorted? Was there a reason the tiles underneath Prince Louis’ feet didn’t line up? Soon, and in an unprecedented move for royal imagery, the Associated Press issued a ‘kill notice’ to its news agencies, after confirming that the image had indeed been edited. ‘At closer inspection it appears that the source has manipulated the image,’ a notice to customers read. 'Clients please be advised that the following story has been killed and should no longer be used.' Then silence from Buckingham Palace as Getty, Associated Press, Reuters and AFP followed suit, and removed the image from their catalogues.

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As the adage goes, ask and you will receive, and as the questions mounted, answers soon arrived with a message from Kate, this time on her and Prince William’s X account. ‘Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,’ she wrote. ‘I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C.’

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But if a picture tells a thousand words, what exactly did the Princess of Wales intend to say with, not just a photograph of her young family, but a highly edited one? Was the concern that we’d see Kate, a working mother-of-three in her early 40s, as she really is? That she may still be suffering from, and showing, the effects of her recent surgery? Or perhaps the most simple explanation: was it that only a picture where all three children were beaming in perfect unison would do? That the royal family must, at all times, appear to be perfect?

Whatever the intent, Kate has demonstrated that no matter how we try to outrun it, the pressure to be perfect – to uphold the core tenets of a flawless existence – is felt by all of us. And many of us have buckled under its weight.

Photoshop first launched in 1990; SnapChat began in 2011; Instagram and FaceTune debuted in 2013, all platforms that have contributed towards the desperate pursuit of perfection. And as we began creating and manipulating digital avatars to represent the sparkliest and most symmetrical versions of ourselves, so began our obsession with making the virtual a reality. In 2022, 31,057 cosmetic procedures took place, an increase of 102% from the previous year, while 80% of teenage girls said they had changed their appearance in an online photo by the age of 13, according to a 2021 survey by skincare brand Dove. If we’re not lying on a doctors’ table, flesh being sliced this way and that, trying to be something we deem ourselves not to be, we’ve seized the scalpel into our own hands and have become the doctors of images of our own faces and bodies; fingers swiping left to right as we suck in our waists, elongate our legs and slim our cheeks.

The Prince and Princess of Wales on their wedding day in 2011.

Cardi B, Sofia Richie, Kim Kardashian and her famous family have been called out for editing their photographs over the years. Last summer, the Skims founder, arguably the only other 'K' with a level of fame on par with Kate Middleton’s, was accused of Photoshopping a picture of her daughter, Chicago West, and Khloe Kardashian’s daughter, True Thompson, taken at Disneyland theme park. ‘Ugh this one needs explaining…’ she wrote over the edited picture of Chicago and True, before explaining that the original image featured Kylie Jenner’s daughter Stormi, but she decided not to post the image because Jenner asked her not to. ‘You know how much a good aesthetic means to my soul,’ Kardashian wrote. ‘And I will be damned if Kylie will ruin that for me and mess up my IG grid. So thank you True for taking one for the team!’ At the time of writing, the post has been liked just shy of 3m times and shows Chicago and True, two young girls, both under the age of 10, smiling at the camera; one real, one Photoshopped.

Kate Middleton is one of the world’s most famous and photographed women. For anybody doubting her clout, Google searches for the family’s edited photograph have rocketed by 3,200% in the last 24 hours alone. And, of course, at the heart of the very existence of the royal family lies in their ability to be seen. The Queen famously said ‘I have to be seen to be believed’. That is one of the very real, tangible ways in which they can be seen to offer support and bolster causes close to their hearts. They offer their appearance in exchange for publicity, and therein lies the tacit agreement between the royal family and the press. But when even a Mother's Day greeting from the royals comes with the condition of perfection, where are the rest of us supposed to hinge our dwindling expectations of transparency? And even more so than depicting a picture-perfect portrait of a family, isn't the issue at the core of this one of trust?

Whatever the intention, the editing of the image has catastrophically backfired. Far from reassuring the public, the tinkering has only served to further the salacious gossip that has been circling the family. Two days after the image’s release, there are rumours that the three children’s faces were Photoshopped into the image from an event they attended in November at a food bank. There are rumblings that Kate is so unwell that the entire image was created by Artificial Intelligence, and, in the furthest reaches of the internet, there are whispers that Kate is actually in hiding, or has left her marriage.

In today's hyper-edited reality, normality would have made a stronger case for the Waleses being imperfectly perfect; a mother looking tired perhaps, children not looking directly at the camera. Instead, with a swipe of her finger, the princess has endorsed a practice that many of us have either consciously or subconsciously internalised. She has reiterated how desperate, or rather how fruitless, the search for what we don’t have really is. An annual Adobe Photoshop subscription sits just shy of £300 a year, the price of a monthly FaceTune membership is £9.99, but at exactly what cost does the pursuit of perfection come?

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Naomi May

Acting News Editor

Naomi May is a freelance writer and editor with an emphasis on popular culture, lifestyle and politics. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard as its Fashion and Beauty Writer, working across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Acting News Editor at ELLE UK and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others.