Fury over three-year-old's retouched school photo

The father of a three-year-old girl from northern Sweden is outraged that school photographers have retouched his daughter’s school picture for the second year in a row.

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Per Engman, the proud father of three-year-old Meja Flymalm from Luleå is irate that a scar on his daughter’s face has magically disappeared from her class picture.

“It’s just not right, it’s a sign that people refuse to accept the world as it is and all these problems associated with idealized beauty just seem wrong,” Engman told the local Norrbottens-Kuriren newspaper.

Last year, Meja fell down the night before her school picture, leaving her with a visible red mark on her cheek. But when the photos came back, the mark was gone.

This year, school photographers took it upon themselves to edit Meja’s photo to remove a scar on her nose from stitches she received after falling off a sofa.

“They assume that parents don’t want scars, but I do. The scar is a part of who she is,” her father told the newspaper.

Thord Larsson of Thords foto who was hired by the preschool to take the pictures said that the photo retouching took place at the lab and that many parents are happy to have blemishes digitally removed from their children’s faces.

“There are a lot of parents who are happy when marks which may have shown up from a scratch that morning are made to disappear, and the same goes for runny noses,” Larsson told Norrbottens-Kuriren.

“We just want things to be nice and cute.”

Larsson was nevertheless apologetic about the incident, claiming that children’s school pictures are normally never retouched without the parents’ permission.

“We don’t sit around and embellish the pictures; we think the children are really sweet as they are,” said Larsson.