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