[Photo by Liang Luwen/For China Daiy]

How a bad airbrush job ruined my wedding day

Family photos tend to capture the happy moments in life: a child's eyes wide with excitement as they open a birthday present, a fresh graduate tossing his mortar board into the air, or the exhausted relief on a runner's face at the end of a marathon.

But when did we start airbrushing our memories?

A photo studio in the UK caused a stir recently when parents criticized a service in which it offers to use Photoshop tools to remove marks and blemishes from their child's annual school portrait.

Cardwell & Simons charges 7 pounds ($8.50) for the service, although in defense the company director told the Daily Mail newspaper that it refuses to alter the shape of a child's face. She said most requests "are to do with clothing, like a stain on the child's top, or with hair being untidy or windswept".

People still complained, however. One angry mother was quoted in the same report as saying, "An airbrushing service sends out the message that if you're not happy with anything about your physical appearance, then you can change it, and that is an extremely negative thing to be saying to children.

'It is all a result of the Kardashian-style celebrity culture where people are measured on how they look," she added.

The story made me shudder - not least because it reminded me of my wedding day.

My wife and I were married four years ago at a claustrophobic civil affairs office in Huzhou, the nearest city to my wife's hometown in Zhejiang province.

Far from the glamour and romance of a Hollywood movie wedding, the counter for registering a marriage was right next to the one handling divorces, and just down the hall from one handing out death certificates.

One of the women who handled our paperwork (she looked about 17 and wore a woolen sweater with a cartoon bunny on the front) told us to head around the corner to get our photo taken for the license.

We ended up in a tiny two-room studio: one with a camera pointed at two unfeasibly small stools and a red screen, and the other with a bored-looking woman in front of an old, grubby Apple Mac.

Click. One rapid-fire shot and it was done. I didn't even get a chance to comb my hair.