The Real Problem with TikTok’s ‘Glamour’ Filter
It’s not about beauty standards or even AI
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about TikTok’s new “bold glamour” filter: a technologically impressive but ethically dubious tool that makes you look like you put on a lot of make-up and also gained a white great-grandma somewhere. (Note the narrowed nose and changed eyelids in the photo above.)
At least, the filter does this if you’re a woman. If you’re a man, it just gives you clear skin then leaves you the hell alone. Of course.
Predictably, the internet raised the alarm about the impacts “bold glamour” could have: setting unrealistic beauty standards, damaging girls’ confidence, inspiring more plastic surgery, etc. The internet is also rightly worried about the implications of this technological leap for deepfakes and misinformation.
All of this is valid. It’s not good for girls to think that we women must spend our lives plucking hairs off our eyebrows so we can glue them to our eyelids or whatever. It’s also not good that we’ll be totally unable to parse reality from misinformation online in, probably, two years. (I thought we had at least five! What happened?!?)
But while these critiques are valid, I argue that they fail to even notice or mention the underlying…
