French Cover Girls Bare All

French Elle's decision to feature eight models without the aid of makeup or airbrushing on its April cover has earned near-unanimous praise from female bloggers. Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress, though, presents the move as little more than a ploy and a step backwards for body-image troubled women. "A lot of people have done a lot of work over the years to get people to understand that images you see on magazine covers are not images of actual human beings," he writes, suggesting that French Elle's initiative is "a deliberate effort to re-inject the artifice into the conversation under guise of rejecting it."