In May 2016, the four original members of The Try Guys, Keith Habersberger, Ned Fulmer, Eugene Lee Yang and Zach Kornfeld, let a team of makeup artists, photographers and retouchers turn them into copies of famous male celebrity photos for BuzzFeed's Body Positive Week. Each man picked a star whose look he secretly wanted, recreated the shot, and then watched Photoshop do what diet and training could not. The finished images looked like magazine covers. The men's reactions were the real story: almost none of them felt better about themselves, and several said the "perfect" versions were not even that attractive.
The experiment is still one of the clearest demonstrations of how far commercial images of men are edited, and why comparing yourself to them is a losing game.
What the Try Guys actually did
According to coverage at the time, each member chose a well-known image and was matched with a professional team:
- Keith Habersberger recreated a photo of John Krasinski. His arms were roughly doubled in size and his stomach pulled in.
- Zach Kornfeld took on Justin Bieber's much-discussed underwear campaign image, itself the subject of an earlier retouching controversy. His hairline, upper body and lower body were all reshaped.
- Ned Fulmer went for Cristiano Ronaldo. His muscles were sharpened and his body hair removed.
- Eugene Lee Yang recreated Channing Tatum, with added definition and a reshaped silhouette.
The video shows each stage: the nervous "before" conversations, the shoot, and the reveal of the edited photo. You can watch the full piece here.
How much retouching goes into a "perfect" male photo
Most people know that magazine images are edited. Fewer appreciate how routine and how extensive the changes can be. In a typical commercial shoot, a subject who already trains hard is lit to deepen shadows on the abdomen, posed to stretch the torso, sometimes dehydrated or pumped up just before the shot, and then retouched afterwards. Retouchers can widen shoulders, shrink waists, smooth skin, sharpen muscle lines, adjust hairlines and alter proportions in ways the eye simply accepts as real.
The Try Guys experiment made that process visible on four ordinary-looking men. The result looked convincing precisely because nothing about it was unusual for the industry.
Why male body image matters too
Conversations about unrealistic beauty standards usually focus on women, and for good reason: the pressure on women has been heavier and more relentless for longer. But men are not immune, and research has been catching up.
Since the 1980s, fitness magazines and advertising have shown more and more partly undressed, highly muscular men. Studies of college-aged men suggest that absorbing these idealised bodies as the norm is a strong predictor of a drive to become more muscular. At the extreme end is muscle dysmorphia, a form of body dysmorphic disorder in which a person sees himself as too small or not muscular enough even when his build is normal or already large. Estimates of how common it is vary widely, and it is reported more often among weightlifters, bodybuilders and anabolic steroid users. In 2000, psychiatrist Harrison Pope and colleagues described this cluster of worries in the book The Adonis Complex.
The original version of this story was written by Mark DeNicola, an actor who described being told in auditions that he was not "manly" enough for lead roles. Experiences like his show how body ideals do not stay on billboards; they shape casting, dating and how people speak to themselves.
What the four men learned
Before the reveal, some of the guys admitted they were worried they would prefer the edited versions of themselves. In the end the reaction was more mixed and more honest. They agreed that the polished results looked unreal, and that perfection was not the same as attractiveness.
Eugene Lee Yang put the key lesson most clearly. Looking at an image of the body he had always wanted, he realised he still saw his stomach as the problem. As he put it: "If you have a problem with how you look, that's a way deeper issue than just changing your outsides."
That insight matches what clinicians say about body dissatisfaction. It usually lives in how a person thinks and feels, not in any single measurement, which is why changing the body alone rarely resolves it.
A mirror exercise, and what research says about it
DeNicola suggested a personal practice that helped him. Alone and in private, stand in front of a full-length mirror, let your inner critic list every part of your body it dislikes, then go back to each part one by one and deliberately meet it with kindness, for example by saying "I love you" while looking at it. Repeat until the emotional charge eases.
It sounds simple, and it is related to a technique therapists really use. Mirror exposure is a common part of cognitive behavioural treatment for body image problems: people look at themselves in a mirror in a structured way, often describing what they see, until the anxiety fades. A systematic review cited in a 2020 study in Eating and Weight Disorders concluded that mirror exposure, alone or within CBT, reduced body dissatisfaction, although the evidence base is still small.
A few practical notes if you want to try something similar:
- Do it somewhere private where you feel safe, and stop if it becomes overwhelming.
- Describe as well as appreciate. Plain, factual descriptions ("my arms are long, my shoulders slope") can be as useful as affirmations.
- Repeat it. Like any exposure exercise, the effect builds over sessions rather than in one go.
- If thoughts about your body are constant, distressing or affecting eating or exercise, talk to a doctor or a mental health professional.
Seeing edited images for what they are
You cannot avoid retouched images, but you can change how you read them. Treat any glossy body on a cover or campaign as a product, not a person: a combination of genetics, a full-time training and diet schedule, professional lighting, careful posing and digital edits. Notice when scrolling leaves you feeling worse and follow accounts that show bodies as they are. And when you train or eat well, set goals around strength, energy and health rather than a picture that even its subject does not look like in real life.
A footnote on the group: The Try Guys left BuzzFeed in 2018 to run their own company. Ned Fulmer was removed from the group in September 2022 after an internal review into his conduct, and the line-up has since expanded with new members.
Sources: Video by The Try Guys / BuzzFeed (2016); PinkNews; PetaPixel; Wikipedia: The Try Guys; Wikipedia: Muscle dysmorphia; Eating and Weight Disorders (2020); original essay by Mark DeNicola via Collective Evolution.
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