Gray’s Anatomy – Jowls like a clean-shaven gerbil? – By Richard Gray

It’s Friday, so that means it’s Gray’s Anatomy! Each Friday, Richard Gray graces us with his humorous mobile photography column, Gray’s Anatomy and this week is no exception with Richard revealing all with his latest dieting plans and more! Don’t miss this – over to you Richard (forward by Joanne Carter).

“I’m going on a diet. Spring has sprung and summer is on its way and I’ve got a couple of new tee shirts with some particularly funny things on them that I’d like to wear in the summer festivals without having to hold my breath the whole time. In the iPhoneography world, if you don’t like the way you look, there’s an app for it. In fact, there are quite a few. In my case, perhaps the one I need is Elasticam. Have a slight belt-overhang? Just a bit too barrell-chested? Jowls making you look a bit like a clean-shaven gerbil? This is the app for you. Simply choose the area you want to shrink and watch the pounds disappear. You can go a bit surreal with it too and stretch out objects like a Dali dreamscape. If it’s the wrinkles rather than the pounds that you want to see disappear, there’s a range of apps for that too, like Beautify, that claim to give you a digital make-over. Or want to try out a new hair color before splashing out on the real thing? Try Clairol’s (free!) hair-coloring app.

But perhaps because a big reason for a lot of people taking pictures is not to make themselves look good but rather to make their friends and family look silly, there seem to be more apps that go in the opposite direction, vanity-wise. So if you tap in “fat” to the search field of the app store, you will find a frighteningly large number of apps that give your victims that classic gerbil look by filling out their cheeks and expanding their neck to gross effect. And just a bit further along the same app store shelf you will find apps such as Oldify, which makes a face sag, wrinkles look more creased and hair go greyer. And then on the shelf above, we find apps such as Wobble. An app only really worth its $0.99 after a few drinks down the pub, you choose the area of a photo that you want to wobble (eg your friend’s nose) and (have you guessed it yet?), yes, it makes it wobble.

So on the first day of my diet I will be trying to steer clear of the sweets section of the supermarket today – though after trying out some of these apps, I might also have to start trying to avoid the App Store for a few days too”.