A Perfect Selfie
Ever since digital media took a big part of people’s social life, the purpose of taking a photo has changed. The camera is no longer just a tool to assist the process of personal memory but to share information in a fast or even competitive way. Nowadays, people pay more attention to how many likes and views a picture gets on social media than the photo itself. The desire by smartphone generation to look attractive online has driven the widespread popularity of beauty camera apps. In particular, the BeautyCam (Also called Meitu), a free Chinese photo editor, hit the Asian market in a short time due to its exclusive photo editing features. And it was rated as one of the most recommended apps in the US Time magazine in 2017.
The availability of various functions in one app is a significant selling point of BeautyCam. There are six options on its homepage — Al Portrait, Beautify, Popular, Workshop, Game Center, and Camera. Al Portrait is explicitly designed for portrait capture, which creates excellent depth of field automatically while taking portraits for all type of phones. Besides that, over 60 free filters are available for users to attain better photo looks. Popular is a picture community for people to share their original high-quality works, meet friends, and make comments about each other’s posts. Workshop and Beautify allow people to be creative about their pictures by building their filters and templets. (you can see the example below). Here, you can add adorable stickers and create your own filter to make imagines look exciting and appealing. The next one is Camera that is used for taking photos, recording videos with filters, and making GIFs. In addition to everything associated with photos, you can play multiple games in Game Center through this app. Just based on what I have introduced, you now probably realized that BeautyCam is more than just a camera app. It offers various popular programs in one app, which brings convenience for users to use.
From these six options, Beautify is the most popular one that drives BeautyCam to stands out in this overwhelming camera-app market, triumphantly. When you click Beautify, it takes you to a page with three new options — Face, Beauty, and Makeup. Under face, you can choose classic, square, rectangle, round, or triangle to change your facial structure. Here are over thirty different makeup styles available for users who never post a picture without wearing makeup on social media. The last one, Beauty, has the most exceptional feature. You are able to make detailed facial changes that you cannot find in any other camera apps! Every part of your face can be readjusted by merely moving your figures on the screen. Such as the size of your cheeks, head, chin, slim, jaw, and eyes. You can also remove dark circles, pimples, and whiten your teeth.
“Achieve the most attractive version of yourself for online uses” is the marketing slogan of BeautyCam. What does it mean to be “the most attractive”? Here are some examples of BeautyCam users. As you notice, in the first picture, the girl erased pimples on her face and turned her skin to be fairly white and smooth. Based one that, the girl achieved the “best version of herself” by having a cleaner and lighter skin. You might be surprised how different the girl looked after using the app in the second picture. According to the final result, the “best version” of her means to have a smaller nose, a smaller jaw, a smaller mouth, thinner, lighter skin and bigger eyes. Many things are in common between the two examples. The primary users of BeautyCam are females. The “best version” of a girl, Asian specifically, is to have bigger eyes, lighter skins, small jaws and well-done makeup, which also tells us what Asian beauty ideals are.
Searching “BeautyCam effects” on google, a picture of a cat caught my attention. The author writes: “This is why you need BeautyCam!” In that picture, BeautyCam turns a bad-face cat to a lovely adorable cat that most likely to be considered as “cuter” than the other one. It might be a little bit exaggerated, but it gives us a good insight why BeautyCam can earn a massive success in this digital world. We all want to look “better” in photos! A Perfect selfie on a perfect sunny day with a perfect caption — that is what we see the most on girls’ social media posts, in general. Honestly, no one cares what filters she used or how much photoshop she did on her face. The things that matter to its viewers are how beautiful and cute she looks on the image, and how wonderful and happy her life looks.
The use of a photo has changed by social media. People nowadays communicate through sharing, liking, and commenting on each other’s posts. The overwhelming online resources push people to become picky about their reading choices. Hence, an attractive and exciting photo is more likely to gain more notices. BeautyCam is born to support internet surfers, girls mainly, to earn that attention by quickly having unique and good-looking photos.
However, the manipulation and representation of imagines like “a perfect selfie” can also be problematic in the long run by giving a false perception of a beauty that is far from achievable for humans without the use of and editing tool. This way, the standard for someone to be beautiful will be so high that most people will not even dare to compare themselves with the internet beauty. The feminine beauty standard has always been a socially constructed notion and throughout history, society holds a false belief that physical attractiveness is women’s most essential assets and something all women should strive to achieve and maintain. BeautyCam, an influential digital innovation, aggressively reinforces the conventional stereotype against women by encouraging users to edit their face to a “perfect” look. The popularity of BeautyCam tells us how virtual it can be to live in the digital age. But still, more and more people use BeautyCam to edit pictures every day. Yeah, why would we stop? I guess, for most of us, nothing is more important than having a perfect selfie that is ready to post on Instagram and get likes and followers.
