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It’s almost swimsuit season, ladies, and what better way to motivate you to get in shape than an image of a girl whose bikini body couldn’t exist in nature? Target’s latest photoshop fail has gone viral thanks to sleuthing from the folks over at Jezebel and The Ethical Adman. They came upon this image of model R’el Dade posing in Xhilaration® ‘s Junior’s Midkini 2-Piece Swimsuit (top $19.99) in leopard print. Because of the awful job, Target already took down the full-image from its site. You’ll notice her arms are retouched to be impossibly thin and stretched out, but drop your eyes down to the bikini bottom, and you can clearly see something gone horribly awry in poor R’el’s crotch region. It seems the graphic designers really wanted to give this already thin woman a more pronounced thigh gap because…why exactly?
A closeup of the image will show you how poorly ‘shopped it is:
What’s interesting, though, is that none of the other bikini-clad Target models are retouched in such an offensively terrible manner. Compare R’el’s image to this one:
The second image is totally OK, right? So why the misstep? Even if it was a mistake, surely one of the many people tasked with putting the Target website together would have noticed that Ms. Dade’s crotch had been hacked off into oblivion.
What do you think happened here? Let us know in the comments below!
UPDATE: Target has released a statement addressing the gaffe. “In response to your query about the swimsuit image on target.com, this was an unfortunate error on our part and we apologize. We have removed the image from our website.” They cited a “photo editing error” as the reason for the slip-up.
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