We all know that OK Magazine lied about Britney’s weight loss, and Glamour airbrushed America Ferrera. And now there’s another problem—or is it a problem? Conde Nast has admitted to airbrushing ultra-thin models to make them look larger.

[There is] a trend towards presenting less “extreme” images of thinness and of enhancing figures. “Where models are looking particularly gaunt, magazines are saying, ‘We can’t have that – fill out their chests…It is now deemed just as negative to be too thin as too fat. Every­one is scared of being highlighted as the magazine or label that promotes very thin girls, so they are being a lot more careful about the images they present”…

Nicky Eaton, the head of press and PR at Condé Nast, which publishes Vogue, GQ, and Glamour, also confirmed that images of models were enhanced to make them appear fuller-figured. “There have been cases where models are booked way ahead of a shoot and then they turn up two months later looking less healthy and perhaps a bit underweight. We wouldn’t be happy showing them that way, so it is then that we would need that person to look a little bit fuller.”

I think it’s a little diningenuous to pretend that this is the motivation. Remember when Kiera Knightley was airbrushed in the chest? Feministing agrees, and points out why this is dangerous:

At its core, I don’t believe this type of Photoshopping is about deflecting criticism that models and celebrities are dangerously thin. I think this is about perpetuating an even more unrealistic beauty standard than unattainable thinness (something I never thought possible): the message is that you should be super, super skinny, borderline skeletal, but without any of the things that come with the territory, like jutting hipbones or small boobs. So even the skinniest celebrities STILL require Photoshopping to meet this standard. You can be less than a size zero and still lose this game. And that’s pretty frightening.

So what do you think? Is airbrushing okay as long as we’re making the models look larger? Or is airbrushing in general just reinforcing a totally unattainable beauty ideal?