PERFECT FACE FILTER SKIN
PERFECT FACE FILTER SERIES

It's like a flood that's constantly swallowing us.” 'We've never been in a historical time period where we saw this many perfected images of beauty. But the common response to criticism that these pretty filters are confidence boosters is negated by the fact it can have the exact opposite effect, Engeln said. That's not to shame people who express themselves through make up or enjoy beauty bloggers. 'They don't necessarily see the link between the two because it's on your phone and seems harmless.' Why we Facetune, even though nobody buys it 'People who are all caught up in taking down ideals in advertising still use the filters,' said Harris-Taylor. They do this by blurring the boundary between celebrity and close friend.Īnd some who may espouse body positivity are still Facetuning. The economic business model of influencers relies on sneaking by the defenses we've built to protect ourselves from believing the false ideals promised in ads. The new type of celebrity born out of social media - the influencer - helped popularize this aesthetic, also known as Instagram face. Now, make up is supposed to reshape your entire face. It’s no longer about using concealer to cover up a pimple. So you buy 10 make up brushes and learn contouring and shading just to go out. 'If you want to look like that filter or even hope to come close to it, it takes a level of expertise and money and time that was never required before.' 'For a lot of women, it's also increasing the amount of time and money they spend on cosmetics,' said Engeln. Unlike criticizing an advertising company, we're the ones manipulating ourselves based off inhuman ideals with just a few button presses on our phones. But as we've seen with body positivity, combatting beauty trends is at best a slow, incremental, imperfect process. It looks weird and ridiculous when it's completely flawless, so it's strange that people are setting that as the ideal.'Īpplying the same conceits of body positivity to everything above the neck, 'Epidermis' highlights the beauty of untouched faces with scars, pimples, blemishes, and burns.

PERFECT FACE FILTER SKIN

There's a flatness to it because skin does have texture and different tones to it.

PERFECT FACE FILTER SERIES

'When you take the real skin out of someone and make it look almost plastic, you start to look inhuman, slightly alienated,' said Sophie Harris-Taylor, the photographer behind 'Epidermis,' a series of beauty shots using models who struggle with skin acceptance. It makes one wonder: Is anyone even really buying these pretty filters? Do we actually find their versions of us more beautiful? And if not, why do we keep using them anyway? Suddenly you're left staring at the blackest mirror of technology and see your regular, normal, untouched IRL face. The real dread settles in when the app fails to register your face, and the digital mask falls. Who can ever forget the dizzying existential crisis of first seeing yourself through the Snapchat pretty filter? It's not just the glimpse at what you'd look like if you fit the beauty standard it projects, making you more youthful, blemish-free, wrinkle-free, symmetrical, whiter ( according to some), and with bigger eyes. 'To compare yourself to a perfect version of yourself is giving us even more opportunities to feel like we fall short, and will always fall short.' 'You think, 'Oh, is that me? Is that really me?'' 'You get so used to seeing yourself with these filters that when you look in the mirror you feel mildly horrified,' said Renee Engeln, a psychology professor at Northwestern University who authored Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women. Because we're all personally invested in believing in the distorted lie that is the pretty filter. The face positivity, or skin acceptance movement, aims to counter the uncanny valley propagated by these filters in the same way the body positivity movement sought to take down narrow beauty ideals portrayed in photoshopped ads and magazine covers.īut the face positivity movement has its work cut out for it.

Then seemingly overnight, one by one, they were replaced by weird, poreless alien baby-face versions of themselves.įrom this horror story, another phenomenon has emerged, seeking to rid us of these perfect, poreless clones. Instagram used to be populated by normal (if carefully curated) pictures of your friends and family on vacation, a hike, or at a party. In our series Lies the Internet Told Me, we call 'em all out.Īs Snapchat 'pretty' filters and Facetune retouching rose in popularity over the last few years, it must've felt like your social media feeds turned into a modern reboot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Before deepfakes and alternative facts, the online world was already telling us fibs.

Perfect face filter