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Kerry Washington on Photoshop: ‘Honey, I Need Something Sometimes’

Keeping it real.

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Kerry Washington addressed her Photoshopped Adweek cover during Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul Session conference in Los Angeles on April 9.

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While the Scandal star, 39, admitted the photo was “strange to look at” in an April 5 Instagram post, she knows that editing is a necessary evil.

“I want to be really honest. Photoshopping is not the devil. It's not all horrible. I’ve had days where I show up to the cover of a magazine and I’m in a more hormonal moment of the month and I may have a big red dot [on my forehead],” Washington told the audience. “When I had comments last week about a cover that I felt uncomfortable with, the response was like, ‘You don’t need anything’ and I was like, ‘Honey, I need something sometimes.’ And a wrinkle in the dress, you want to smooth that out — that’s great.”

The mom of Isabelle, with husband Nnamdi Asomugha, may be fine with a little airbrushing here and there, but she didn’t want it taken to the extreme.

Best photobomb of my life. #supersoulsessions #supersoulsisters @oprah @drshefalitsabary

A post shared by Kerry Washington (@kerrywashington) on

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“I was very taken aback and very uncomfortable about looking at an image that I didn't recognize as myself,” she continued. “In a way, I felt like that is not OK with me because that echoes that little girl who thought, ‘I wasn’t enough.’ And I know that I am enough. So don’t make me feel like I’m not enough by changing me to fit some idea of what you think I’m supposed to look like.”  

Washington realizes that “we have become a society of picture adjusters” as she described in her Instagram post — but knows that they can’t break her character within.

“I’ve always been me, and I didn’t really conform. I didn’t change those things that people told me I had to change,” she said of her career. “I don’t think I’m going to be rewarded for being someone else. I never have been. Also, I don't have the energy. I spent the first 20 years of my life trying to be somebody else, I just don't have the energy anymore.”

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