Pascal Dangin is the retouching genius for the worlds top glossies

So surprise, surprise — it’s not just great genes, talent and contacts that help budding starlets and their more famous friends grace the covers of the world’s glossiest magazines. According to The New Yorker, they have another secret weapon: retoucher extraordinaire Pascal Dangin.

With his painterly technique and digital mastery, the French-born, New York-based Dangin tweaks hundreds of images a month for Vogues American, British, French and Italian, as well as advertisements for clients such as Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior (Christy Turlington needs the least work, for your information). Some photographers — Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Annie Leibowitz among them — rarely work with anyone else. Celebrities in the know are so obsessed with him they keep him on a retainer, so that any portrait of them has to pass under his expert eye and be cleansed of crow’s feet, stray hairs or anything else that makes them less than perfect, even though Dangin admits that it’s not always about removal — during the grunge period, he had to decide “which was the cool wrinkle to leave”.

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