Educator Elisabeth Russo wanted to teach her junior and senior graphic design students at Assumption High School in Louisville, Ky., a lesson.

Sure, there was the practical side: How to use Adobe Photoshop.

But there also was a much more important goal: "I wanted to educate the girls on our vision of beauty," Russo says.

"My students asked: 'Who's to say who's perfect? Society does that, but it's not even real,' " Russo says. "Our concept of beauty isn't real."

First, the 23-year-old teacher had her students watch a film called "Evolution," produced by Dove soap's "Campaign for Real Beauty."

In the video, which lasts 1 minute, 17 seconds, an average-looking woman is transformed by makeup artists and hairstylists, expert lighting and a talented photographer.

Then the film shows how the click of a computer mouse can transform a pretty woman into an individual of ideal proportions.

The final product: a billboard campaign that eliminates all existence of the very real woman first seen in the film.

The film clip concludes with the words, "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted. ... Every girl deserves to feel beautiful just the way she is."

Russo says her students couldn't believe what they had seen.

"I was surprised that the woman in the video was already attractive before they straightened her neck, slimmed her eyebrows and made her eyes bigger," Kaitlan Harris, 18, says.

"At Assumption, everyone comes to school relaxed, without makeup. Personalities are more attractive to us than looks ... but that's not at all what's portrayed in the magazines."

"I realize now that those are unrealistic standards to hold myself to. There's more than one form of beauty. ...You have to be confident in yourself and not get stuck in stereotypes."

Jordan Nalley, 17, felt "sick" after watching the film "because (advertisers and magazines) put out this image ... and that's what we want to be, that's what we want to look like."

And that's what Russo asked her students to do: Take their photos and transform them with Photoshop.

Russo showed her students before and after images of models who had been digitally enhanced.

She taught them to apply makeup, stretch out their faces, deepen the hue of their skin and remove any trace of blemishes, take hair from someone else's photo or put their faces on the bodies of another.

Each of the young women had a photo taken of herself without any makeup on or her hair perfectly coiffed, thereby becoming a computer-screen canvas.

The teens became artists who could virtually mold themselves into anyone they ever thought they wanted to be.

Learning the truth about beauty and how it can be distorted "probably gives girls my age confidence," says Thia Gholson, 17.

There's a modicum of relief in realizing "sometimes what you see isn't what you get," she says.