A Generation Of Beauty Clones
What happens when society chooses pixels over pores?
The technological advancement of the 21st century has radically changed the face of society. Within seconds, our faces and bodies can be restructured to fit the desired virtual metric. It has become normal to have your face ‘perfected’ by an app and it’s becoming all too easy to book in for that follow-up procedure.
Girls as young as 11 are regularly using filters so they can look better online. If that doesn’t alarm you — it should. Being an insecure teenager is hard enough without having a beautiful clone to compare yourself to. You might as well have a surgeon dotting ink on their faces telling them where they could use improvement.
Top podcaster Joe Rogan uploaded a photo of himself after using a filter that his 10-year-old daughter showed him. The post went viral.
For anyone unfamiliar with Joe Rogan, here’s the original picture.
While the comparison is hilarious, the pervasive influence of these technologies on our psychological wellbeing is deeply concerning.
Young girls are internalizing this virtual aesthetic before they’re old enough to even know what they might look like after puberty — let alone before they can learn to be comfortable in their own skin.
How healthy is it for any of us to be playing around with these filters?
The Perfect Face Surgery
Virtual mirror in my hand, change my face to match social demand…
Images of people’s faces are being manipulated according to a specific template, in the rise of what is known as ‘perfect face surgery’. Having never heard of it, but seeing the influence of it everywhere, a friend of mine sent me the video below.
She prefaced it with;
“The girl is soo stunning and then she gets this ‘perfect face’ surgery and when you see her original face again- she’s ‘ugly’, she just doesn’t look right! It’s F#cked.”
No matter what we look like, when an app can smooth lines, lift brows, straighten teeth and sculpt jawlines — it becomes hard to confront our actual faces in the mirror. What was once the original model, becomes a beta-version of what could be. We see flaws that we wouldn’t have known about otherwise, we see inadequacies where there was once just flesh and features. Our brains aren’t wired to cope with this kind of information in any sort of productive way, aside from booking in for a consultation and working out the bugs.
Symmetry
The virtual arbiters of beauty leave no room for deviation, and the metric is far from being random. Take an image of any woman and run it through a ‘satanic filter’ and the results will be near identical — her lips will be bigger, skin smoother and her face more symmetrical. It doesn’t factor in an individual’s unique traits or personal charm — it is a unifying brush stroke that leaves no woman behind in its quest to create the perfect visual creature.
But why is it so compelling?
Symmetry is an objective standard of evolutionary beauty. We have evolved to see it as a sign of health and fertility, our brains scan for it before we even know what’s happening. Babies, who have yet to form any subjective preference for attractiveness, will be drawn to well-proportioned faces. It is a biological fact that we are mesmerized by symmetrical features, irrespective of personal taste.
This is just another way in which our deepest instincts have been used against us, hijacked to turn a profit. The same way we are addicted to sugar, we are addicted to hyper-real images of beauty, regardless of whether it’s good for us, regardless of whether we actually want to look like clones of each other.
We are sacrificing our individuality to keep up with a cyborg standard of beauty.
No One Looks Good Enough
Even the most symmetrical and infamously desirable people in society are not exempt from the modernized makeover of pixels over pores. There are increasingly popular Instagram and TikTok accounts that take original photos of celebrities and edit them according to the emerging virtual aesthetic. These images flood the ‘explore’ pages, subconsciously setting the standard for modern beauty around the world.
This is a photo of actress Julia Roberts. Without the side-by-side comparison, it would be hard to pinpoint who the woman on the right was. All of the texture, lines, and asymmetries have been ironed out. She looks familiar, not to Julia Roberts, but to millions of girls on social media and increasingly — women in real life. These edited versions have become so normalized that looking at the untouched pictures of celebrities was more of a shock to me than the edits. I’d become so used to seeing this virtual aesthetic that I was surprised to see just how “human” they looked. It dawned on me that my own untouched face, things like lines around my eyes, the asymmetry of my smile and pores — aren’t just factors of my pedestrian level of beauty, but universally human features.
What happens when untouched Julia Roberts is no longer deemed ‘beautiful’ by modern standards?
Role Models
The same Instagram account that edited Julia Roberts within an inch of her life; goddess.women — is gaining popularity with celebrities themselves. The Kardashians, Pamela Anderson, and Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely, among others — are featured in a highlight reel titled ‘noticed’, where the account proudly screenshots interactions it has had with celebrities, asking for watermark-free copies and “what app do you use?”
Low and behold, the manipulated images are reposted on celebrity pages for the world to see; the modernized makeover of pixels over pores is reiterated.
So what’s the big deal?
Accounts like these are a drop in the ocean of messages that tell women that human standards of beauty are no longer enough. Every time we see this face, it becomes harder to look at our own. When we see that celebrities are changing themselves to fit the template, it feels like we have no choice but to follow suit. Society has committed itself to pixelated perfection and to opt-out is to fall behind.
Life Imitates Art
Digital ‘correction’ is harder to ignore in a culture that normalizes cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery.
- The number of people under 30 getting cosmetic injectables has increased 39% from 2010 to 2019.
- In 2020 — over 2.6 million Americans got Botox and 1.7 million opted for other fillers. This is an increase of 54% for Botox and a 73% increase for fillers since 2019.
- Over 40% of surgeons reported social media as the determining factor in requests for surgery, with a particular rise in teenagers getting rhinoplasty (nose jobs) due to the amount of time they are spending on zoom during online schooling.
We are quite literally molding our physical bodies to match trending digital avatars.
What’s The Cost?
In our quest for modern perfection, diversity has come to a screeching halt. Insecurities concerning our physical appearance will continue to rise as the baseline for beauty stretches further away from what any of us look like naturally. Lines, texture, the natural movement of our faces have been added to a growing list of ‘imperfections’, and it seems botox, fillers, and surgery are now the pre-conditions for building an aesthetically sound face. While we might come to terms with the time and money invested in these procedures, we might lose ourselves in the process.
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