This creepy picture of a “topless” Sailor Moon statue has popped up online. This statue, found in a mall in Jakarta, Indonesia, was posted to Danny Choo’s web site yesterday. It was then shared by such sites as Kotaku, which is a web site which used to post news about video games. Danny Choo jokingly mentioned that this was the new uniform for the new series which has dispensed with the top.

But what’s really going on? It doesn’t take much examination to see that this is a severely faded statue. Indeed there are considerable amounts of white paint which have faded away. Sailor Moon appears topless only because the white of her top is gone leaving only the flesh colour underneath it. Look at the shoulders which still have those ridged shoulder parts that Sailor Moon’s sailor fuku normally has. This is supported by the fact that the gloves and whites of her eyes also only appear as a flesh colour rather than the white colour they should be.

This doctored image shows what the statue may have looked like with the original white paint:

Keep in mind that only the colour and brightness of certain areas were modified to create this effect. This is indeed not a topless statue at all, just one that’s probably close to 20 years old and in need of a fresh coat of paint.

I tried to fix up the face as well but I think I went a bit overboard with my restoration attempt…