Photoshopped images to come with a warning under new French law

The authorities hope the new “Photoshop warning” will discourage unhealthy extreme thinness among people trying to emulate unrealistic body shapes that were faked with a computer programme.

Marisol Touraine, the former health minister who introduced the legislation, said it was intended “to avoid promoting inaccessible ideals of beauty and to prevent anorexia among young people.”

She added: “Exposing young people to normative and unrealistic body images leads to a feeling of self-depreciation and poor self-esteem that can have an impact on health-related behaviour.”

France also compels models to provide doctor’s notes certifying that they are not too skinny and their body mass index is healthy.

France is not the first country to introduce such rules. Israel has also done so.

But the French move has prompted Getty Images, a US-based international photography agency, to ban “any creative content depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger” from Sunday.

Books such as “French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure”, by Mireille Guiliano, have exported the notion that French women stay slim while still eating bread and pastry, drinking wine and enjoying three-course meals. The new legislation recognises that eating disorders pose a major health problem in France.

Gabrielle Deydier, the author of “You Aren’t Born Fat (On ne naît pas grosse)", published this summer, said the French tend to despise fat people. She said she had lost a job because a colleague objected to her obesity, and was told that it was “well-known” that fatter people had lower IQs.