The Kate Middleton Facetune rumors, explained

After weeks of uncertainty and absolutely no pictures to prove that Kate Middleton is even alive, the royal family have finally released a picture to put everyone’s mind at ease, but people are still skeptical — something just seems off.

The picture was shared on Mother’s Day, 10th of March in the U.K., and shows Kate along with her three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis. This all comes following months of speculation following Kate’s surgery back in January, which resulted in the Princess of Wales having to cancel numerous public appearances. In the weeks that followed, she disappeared from the public eye altogether and with that, the conspiracy theories and rumors began flooding in, people feared that she may have cancer, or that she’d even had a stroke.

However, this new image has done nothing to quell the endless speculation regarding Middleton’s whereabouts. According to the Mirror, major photo agencies including the Associated Press and Reuters gave a “kill notice” after multiple claims that the photo was edited. Naturally this has only served to put the conspiracy theorists into overdrive. There is very little doubt that the photo is edited, with multiple very obvious mistakes from Princess Charlotte’s wrist looking odd to the unseasonably green leaves in the background. All of this, coupled with the image being pulled has resulted in a PR disaster for Buckingham Palace.

Did Kate Middleton use an editing app like Facetune?

Kate addressed the controversial photo herself via social media. In the brief statement she admits that she does “occasionally experiment with editing.” Making edits to a photo is very easy and accessible nowadays, and if the editor was Kate, she could have easily used an app such as Facetune to mess around with the pic before posting. That is the official story, but people aren’t buying it. 

For many, it’s hard to picture the Princess of Wales messing about with Facetune in her spare time.

Although others took the statement at face value and found it more funny than anything.

In all likelihood, Kate’s story seems pretty sound. The DailyMail consulted multiple photo editing experts who all seemed to think that it was likely Kate herself who messed with the pic. Thank about it; if the Palace really were trying to cover up the fact that something happened to Kate Middleton, there would definitely not be so many mistakes (not to throw shade at the Princess’s editing skills). If they were trying to hide something, they would have definitely done a much better job of it.