Did a widely shared image accurately depict the all-female crew of a Blue Origin spaceflight, with one post describing it as "one giant leap for Botox"? No, that's not true: The image was digitally edited. The original picture was taken by Justin Hamel for the New York Times and showed Katy Perry, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn, Lauren Sánchez and Amanda Nguyen -- the crew of the April 14, 2025 spaceflight.
The digitally manipulated image was shared in an April 15, 2025, post on X (archived here), along with the following text caption:
One small step for feminism. One giant leap for Botox.
Do men find these plastic identikit women attractive?
I'm interested.
To me they look like vampires in a low budget Dracula remake with an underfunded makeup department.
They all look exactly the same.
Strange.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot)
In reality, the image was fake, and was the result of digital manipulation of an authentic original photograph, taken by the photographer Justin Hamel for the New York Times:
(Source: Instagram screenshot)
