In what seemed to be an online social experiment, blogger and journalist Esther Honig asked different people from many countries around the world to photoshop her photo according to what they deemed to be "beautiful."

The Kansas-based journalist called her experiment "Before & After." Honig contacted almost 40 individuals from more than 25 countries that included Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Kenya, the Philippines and many more. She sent a bare portrait of herself from her shoulders up, only wearing her hair tied up in a bun. No makeup, no accessories -- nothing but a gray backdrop.

She initially got the idea because Photoshop has created society's rather impossible standards of beauty, especially in the United States. With her experiment, she examines the variety of standards of beauty across different cultures on a global level. She utilized freelancing platforms to contact individuals from the many countries worldwide where she was able to correspond both with experts and amateurs in the field. Each designer cost her in a range of $5 to $30 to perform their editing skills with a touch of personal as well as cultural constructs of beauty. Her only request was simply "make me beautiful."

Honig was able to collect 22 images of herself photoshopped in different ways -- some more extravagant than the others. The editing job from Bulgaria, for example, was quite simple with a few touch ups on some facial blemishes and wild hair strands sticking out from her head. The Moroccan version on the other hand clothed her fully, showing only her face, while the Philippine editing made her look like she was in a hair product commercial complete with jewelry and full, heavy makeup.

What Honig learned from this is that while Photoshop allows us to attain unobtainable standards of beauty, comparing the standards on the global scale makes the ideal even more elusive.