From model to billboard in 60 seconds. You’ve got to click the link — it’s an extraordinary clip. Weirdly, though, this video — where a plain model is heavily made-up, lighted, and digitally altered to become a stunningly beautiful billboard creature — almost democratizes the standards of beauty by showing how anyone could become a superstar in print, and how false and superficial the ending “product” is. More pernicious, at least to my eyes, are movies and television, which rely on some of the same trickery, but mainly “cheat” by hiring outliers on the beauty scale and then placing them in shows and scenes that retain the atmospherics of normality. By skimming actresses from the 99.999th percentile of attractiveness and then using them in apparent representations of reality, they create an ideal and expectation that, while theoretically more achievable than the photoshopped model from the video, is actually far less realizable.

Ezra Klein is a former Prospect writer and current editor-in-chief at Vox. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Guardian, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Slate, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He’s been a commentator on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and more.