Brow Beat

What’s Going on With Gal Gadot’s Armpits in the Wonder Woman Trailer?

Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta, haver of green armpits?

Still taken from the trailer

Over the weekend, Warner Bros. dropped a brand new trailer for Wonder Woman, with Gal Gadot reprising her role as Diana of Themyscira. And while fans and critics alike have already dissected the trailer frame by frame, there’s one crucial detail that we still need to address: Gal Gadot’s armpits look … weird.

Not all the time, mind you, but at one very specific moment in the trailer. If you pause at the 1:41 mark, you can see that as Gadot hoists an entire armored vehicle into the air, her underarms appear to be unnaturally smooth and enveloped in a vaguely green haze. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that becomes much more obvious when you consider how many other outlets made that otherwise pretty badass moment the thumbnail when posting their own version of the trailer.

It turns out that the internet is already plenty preoccupied with celebrity armpits in general, and with Gadot’s in particular, so it didn’t require that much digging to determine that in real life, Gadot’s pits are perfectly ordinary and are not, in fact, shielded by mysterious blobs of light. Heck, even elsewhere in the same trailer, when they’re not front and center, Gadot’s pits look totally normal. So why do they appear so strange at this particular moment? Is this just a trick of the light?  Or perhaps the inevitable result of that combination of that ubiquitous orange and teal filtering and the low lighting that makes so many films and television shows look unbearably dark?

Gal Gadot’s unobscured armpits, exposed where anyone can see them.

Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images

The simpler answer is that Gadot’s already-silky pits were probably digitally bleached in postproduction, perhaps out of fear that we as moviegoers aren’t ready to see the creases of a woman’s unobscured armpit in close-up. You might be saying, Really, armpits? Is this seriously still happening in 2017? There’s certainly precedent: Just last year Maxim apparently airbrushed Priyanka Chopra’s armpits into Barbie-like smoothness for their July 2016 cover. Even so, it seems like an enormous waste of effort to recolor the underarms of Wonder Woman herself for a split-second scene, especially when the obvious editing is much more conspicuous than the unaltered lady pits alone could ever be.

On the other hand (or in the other armpit, in this case), maybe the digital team is actually deliberately calling attention to the area underneath Gadot’s arms. Maybe the movie’s mad scientist villain, Doctor Poison (Elena Anaya), has been doctor-poisoning Wonder Woman this whole time, using her deodorant. What a twist that would be.