The laws that made retouching illegal, and why nothing happened

The Norwegian label is specified to the percentage point. It must cover roughly seven per cent of the image surface. It must contrast with the background behind it. It normally sits in the top-left corner. In video, it has to stay there for the duration of the clip.

That is what a state looks like when it has decided to take retouching seriously. Norway’s parliament amended the Marketing Control Act on 2 June 2021 by 72 votes to 15. The amendment came into force on 1 July 2022. Section 2 requires that advertising “where a body’s shape, size or skin has been altered by retouching or other digital manipulation, shall be labelled.” It reaches filters applied before the shutter fires, not only edits made afterwards. It binds influencers receiving “any payment or other benefit”. It names Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter. Both the advertiser and the producer of the image are liable, and for severe violations imprisonment is theoretically available.

Seven weeks later, the Norwegian Consumer Authority softened the guidance.

In August 2022, after objections from working photographers that ordinary editing would trigger the label, the Authority revised its guidelines so that labelling was required only where retouching could create body-image pressure. Brightness and contrast adjustments were exempted. So were colour changes to hair, teeth or eyes, and the removal of background elements. The seven-per-cent badge survived; the question of when you have to wear it did not survive contact with the people who make pictures for a living.

This is the honest shape of the story, and it is not the shape the story is usually given. Four jurisdictions have made undisclosed body retouching unlawful in advertising. None of them has produced a meaningful enforcement action. The correct verb is enacted, not enforced.

Four regimes, no test cases

France went first among the modern statutes. Décret n° 2017-738 of 4 May 2017 came into force on 1 October 2017. Commercial images of models whose body appearance has been digitally altered to look thinner or heavier must carry the words “photographie retouchée”. The penalty was reported at over €37,500 — more than $44,000 — or 30 per cent of the advertising spend, whichever bites harder. The then health minister, Marisol Touraine, framed it as public health: “It is necessary to act on body image in society to avoid the promotion of inaccessible beauty ideals and prevent anorexia among young people.”

Nine years on, the law is widely described as unenforced. It is not repealed, not litigated, not obviously complied with. It sits on the statute book doing whatever it is that unenforced laws do.

Israel got there earliest. The so-called Photoshop Law passed on 19 March 2012 with two prongs. Models with a body mass index under 18.5 may not be used in advertising unless a doctor certifies they are not underweight. And advertisers must disclose when digital tools were used to make a model appear thinner. Its sponsor, Dr Rachel Adato, put it in a sentence: “Beautiful is not underweight, beautiful should not be anorexic.” The fashion activist Adi Barkan was blunter: “This is the difference between thin and too thin. This is the difference between death and life.”

The Israeli law is routinely overstated. It is described in secondary coverage as banning retouching, or as requiring disclosure of photo editing generally. It does neither. The disclosure prong covers slimming alterations in advertising. Removing a spot, warming the skin tone, cleaning a background — none of that is caught. If you have repeated the version where Israel outlawed Photoshop, you have repeated something that is not true, and the true version is narrower and more defensible than the myth.

The one that actually worked was not a law

The single case in this area with a clean, documented outcome came from a self-regulator with no statutory teeth at all.

In July 2011 the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority banned two L’Oréal advertisements outright: a Lancôme ad featuring Julia Roberts and a Maybelline ad featuring Christy Turlington. The complaint came from the Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson. L’Oréal admitted retouching the Turlington image — lightening the skin, reducing shadows, smoothing the lips, darkening the eyebrows — but argued that the result still represented achievable results. The ASA’s finding turned on evidence: L’Oréal had failed to show the extent of the retouching, and so could not substantiate that the pictured result was achievable. Guy Parker, the ASA’s chief executive, stated the principle: “If advertisers go too far in using airbrushing and other post-production techniques to alter the appearance of models and it’s likely to mislead people, then that’s wrong.”

Note what the ASA did not need. It did not need a criminal penalty, a percentage-of-turnover fine, or a specified label geometry. It needed a complaints mechanism anyone could use, an evidential burden placed on the advertiser, and a remedy that could be delivered in weeks: pull the ad. The French and Norwegian regimes have heavier artillery and have fired it at nothing.

The photographers had a point

The easy reading of Norway’s climbdown is capture: an industry lobbied, a regulator folded. Take the objection more seriously than that, because it is the strongest argument against this entire family of laws and it has never been answered.

Every photograph is a manipulation. Choosing a lens compresses or stretches a face. Choosing a light narrows a jaw. A photographer who moves a subject three feet from a window has changed how their body reads more than a retoucher pushing a slider. Digital editing is one continuous surface running from raw conversion to liquefy, and legislators have tried to draw a line across it using words — “shape, size or skin”, “appear thinner” — that do not correspond to any discontinuity in the craft.

The Norwegian Consumer Authority’s revised test is an admission of exactly this. It gave up on defining the technique and switched to defining the harm: label it if the retouching could create body-image pressure. That is more honest and much less administrable. It asks a photographer to predict a psychological effect before posting, and it asks a regulator to prove one before penalising. Nobody has shown they can do either at scale, which may be the real reason no enforcement action has followed.

There is a second problem the statutes never confronted, and it is the one that matters most. A retouched photo disclosure law assumes that disclosure changes what viewers do. That assumption has been tested, and the result is not encouraging: in a 2018 experiment on 144 adolescent girls, participants could not reliably tell reshaped Instagram photos from unaltered ones, and rated the manipulated versions more highly regardless. If the audience cannot detect the manipulation unaided, a label is not a reminder of something they half-noticed. It is the entire signal. Which means its design, placement and enforcement are load-bearing — and in three of these four jurisdictions, nobody is holding the load.

The platforms moved faster than the parliaments

Meanwhile, the most consequential rules on appearance manipulation in the past decade were not passed by anyone.

In October 2019, Facebook’s Spark AR announced it would remove filters that depict or promote cosmetic surgery, and pause approval of new ones pending a policy review. On 27 November 2024, TikTok announced global restrictions on appearance-altering effects for users under 18, rolling out “in the coming weeks”, and explicitly distinguished beauty filters from novelty effects like bunny ears. That announcement arrived against the backdrop of a lawsuit by 14 US attorneys general alleging the platform harms minors’ mental health, which tells you something about the mechanism: the credible threat of litigation moved a product policy in months, while a criminal statute in force since 2017 has moved nothing.

The lesson is not that regulation is pointless. It is that these particular instruments were built to punish an act — applying a slimming edit — that is cheap, invisible, borderless and performed billions of times a day by people who will never read a décret. Regimes that work in adjacent areas do something different: they put the evidential burden on the party making money, they offer a fast cheap remedy, and they are triggered by complaints rather than by inspection.

Until someone builds that, the accurate thing to say about the laws that made retouching illegal is that they made retouching illegal, and then everyone carried on. That is not a small finding. A statute nobody enforces still shapes the conversation — it lets a country believe it has dealt with something. The gap between the seven-per-cent label and the empty enforcement docket is the same gap this publication keeps finding everywhere else: between the announcement and the receipt.