Kate Middleton Enters the Celebrity Photoshop Hall of Shame

There’s a question that’s at the top of mind for the entire world. It’s a wonder the global economy hasn’t completely shut down. The effort it takes to quiet the preoccupation long enough to drive a car, go to work, or even cook a meal—frankly, the human race is at the risk of extinction until the question is answered.

On Tuesday night’s episode of Watch What Happens Live, Andy Cohen articulated it on behalf of all of us: “What the fuck is going on with Kate Middleton?”

He raised the question to the unofficial British ambassador to the United States, John Oliver, who, after acknowledging how wild the Photoshop controversy surrounding the allegedly missing princess is, deadpanned, “There’s a non-zero chance she died 18 months ago.”

The whole Kate Middleton saga is complicated to talk about. (If you need to be caught up on the story, I’d be interested to learn how you figured out the physics of how a human could actually live under a rock.) My conscience and my ghoulish love of dark humor have been engaged in a savage Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots battle for days now.

The longer this has gone on and the wilder the twists are, the darker the theorizing about what’s happening has become—and the more likely those theories are to be right. But skating on top of that cold, concerning frozen lake of darkness is how truly bizarre all of this is. In the days since Photoshopgate, the bizarreness has been doing triple axels and camel spins so impressive the International Olympic Committee is considering allowing the scandal into official competition.

I appreciated that brief exchange between Cohen and Oliver—it’s only 45 seconds—because it encapsulated that moral conflict perfectly: We didn’t want to care about this, it got too outrageous to ignore, and it’s possible something legitimately bad is going on, but it’s reached a level of preposterousness with this Photoshop fiasco that it feels acceptable to make jokes about it.

And what I’m grateful for when it comes to this Photoshop act, and of this whole royal circus, is that it allows us to briefly cast aside the uncomfortable nature of the scandal to delight in one of pop culture’s greatest clown shows: celebrity Photoshop fails. It’s a temporary internet lobotomy. We don’t have to think about what’s actually happening with Kate Middleton. We can just laugh at the Photoshop thing, because if there is one universal truth when it comes to famous people it’s that their Photoshop disasters are inherently funny.

I love when this happens, because it’s like: Did they not think we would notice?

There’s hilarious schadenfreude in the idea that the celebrity obsession with looking as perfect as possible is so extreme that it reaches a point of delusion where they think they can get away with an egregious Photoshop. Or when it’s something like a magazine cover or ad campaign that’s the offender, my overworked, broke ass smugly giggles that so much money was spent on an image that so many highly paid, allegedly important people had to approve—and no one flagged the mistake. Or, in the case of Middleton, there’s something almost cartoonish about the royal palace—like, the institution behind the literal King of England—scrambling amidst an international scandal and thinking that it would help to release an image with Photoshop so shitty, newswires sent out a red alert to stop the presses. I can almost hear the Benny Hill theme playing in the background as they hit send.

It’s the goofiest thing. It’s always hysterical when anyone, like one of us normies, posts bad Photoshop somewhere, thinking they’re pulling a digital fast one. Yeah, Brittany, I am sure your waist is smaller than your left thigh and that door frame behind you isn’t digitally warped—it’s definitely curved that way in real life. But there’s a certain hubris attached when public figures are involved that really dials up the buffoonery.

Remember Khloe Kardashian’s freakishly giant hand? It’s a Photoshop fail so brazen, it transcends into art; I almost want to frame it and hang it in my apartment. (Or maybe it wasn’t Photoshop. Check out Ariana Grande’s thumb here. Perhaps there’s a Hollywood big-hand epidemic!)

Lindsay Lohan apparently also lived somewhere with one of those famous curved door frames.

Aubrey O’Day used to Photoshop herself into beautiful vistas all around the world, pretending she was on vacation there. Absolutely iconic behavior that makes me love her even more.

When it comes to magazine Photoshop disasters, this cover for Vanity Fair’s 2018 Hollywood issue is the Hindenburg. That is, of course, unless Oprah Winfrey has had three hands and Reese Witherspoon’s been walking around disguising her third leg this entire time.

The obvious scrutiny that a photo of Middleton would receive when released in the middle of this real-life telling of Gone Girl 2: Princess Edition makes it truly baffling that the palace would distribute something that’s been edited. But the meticulousness and immediacy with which people on the internet would end up picking apart the photo and explaining its errors was astonishing.

At this point in 2024, after all we’ve seen internet culture accomplish—and destroy—when rallied, maybe it was foolish to be surprised. Once the Extremely Online harnessed the power of the Swifties to get on the Kate Middleton case, it was over for that ragged palace and ole Prince Willy.

A favorite procrastination activity is to scroll through one of the many lists there are of these Photoshop failures. Kate Middleton, wherever you are, you are in elite company.

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