When Glossies Attack: Blake Lively Latest Victim Of Airbrushing Whack Jobs

Blake Lively’s people are throwing a hissy fit over the Gossip Girl star’s cover shot on this month’s Seventeen. And before assuming this is just another case of some publicist overreacting and getting their La Perlas in a twist over nothing, one quick look at the cover in question actually makes us side with the flack this time. Lively’s gone out of her way recently to make sure no one confuses her with Paris Hilton, but her puffy eyes, hollow cheekbones and vampire chompers on the Seventeen cover aren’t helping her case. Which begs the question: why is it so hard for a magazine to shoot a decent celebrity cover? Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Sarah Jessica Parker are all recent victims of the same unflattering cover treatments, and all kinds of oddly unglamorous shots have hit newsstands for years.

Just a few weeks ago, EW chose to accompany a Q&A with Angelina Jolie with a very, very close close-up of what we previously considered one of the most gorgeous faces in Hollywood. But the mag’s effort to showcase Jolie the actress, rather than Jolie the pregnant actress, resulted in the very first photo to make her infamous lips look unsavory. And Scarlett Johansson suffered a similar fate on the cover of artsy mag Paste, turning her trademark chest away from the camera and posing like an effervescent candidate for the role of E.T.’s girlfriend in E.T. 2: Sex And The Extra-Terrestrial.

Maxim somehow thought Jessica Simpson looked sexiest with a frumpy 50s housewife hairdo on a cover from last year, while Vogue recently photoshopped the hell out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head, essentially decapitating her in one swift crop. Sarah Jessica Parker fell victim to the cooking and cleaning obsessives in aprons over at Good Housekeeping, reverting to her frizzy-haired, good makeup-challenged self from the early 90s.

Mariah Carey’s attempt to look soft and angelic backfired on this Allure cover, where the queen diva appears washed out, completely devoid of her naturally tawny skin. Back in the heady days of Lindsay Lohan comeback covers, Maxim tricked the then-straight star out in a very cleavage-y, feisty spread, but Lohan’s sullen facial expression suggest a dire need to strip off the ridiculous Victorian outfits and down the nearest bottle of perfume. And then there’s poor Fergie, who apparently provided an outlet for one very miserable Cosmopolitan eyebrow plucker’s rage.

[Photo credits: Go Fug Yourself, Jezebel, We Heart Angelina]

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