#instagram face

So week nine's lecture was about AR filters and honestly it made me look at my camera roll very differently.

AR (Augmented Reality) filters work by layering virtual things onto the real world through your camera, think dog ears, sparkles, or that smoothing effect that magically erases your pores. They've been around since the 1960s but really exploded after Snapchat and Pokémon Go in 2016.

Here's the twist though, we think of filters as "removing" bad stuff (like a coffee filter blocking grounds), but really they're adding stuff too, new skin texture, new face shapes, new "flavours" we didn't ask for. It's less about subtraction and more about quietly rewriting the image.

The lecture focused heavily on beauty and "surgery" filters, which are apparently some of the most popular ones on Instagram and Snapchat. And they're not neutral. Research has found that recommender systems on platforms like Instagram actually promote facial homogeneity among the most recommended influencers, and exposure to this kind of facial sameness has been linked to lower body image in young women (Smith et al., 2024).

And it gets wilder. There's a term called "Snapchat dysmorphia" (also called "filter dysmorphia") where people bring filtered selfies of themselves, not celebrities, to cosmetic surgeons as their reference photo. Researchers describe filter dysmorphia as a possible branch of body dysmorphic disorder, where patients already preoccupied with their appearance use idealised beauty filters and then come to believe cosmetic procedures can make them look like their filtered selves (Sadati et al., 2023). And the stats back it up: a 2021 survey by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found 75% of surgeons reported patients seeking procedures specifically to look better in selfies, up 18% since 2018.

There's also the whole "Instagram face" thing, that eerily similar look with big eyes, plump lips, sharp cheekbones, "ethnically ambiguous" but somehow always centring the same narrow beauty ideal. Studies analysing popular Instagram beauty filters have found that the beautification process homogenises faces, making them more similar to each other, while preserving the same underlying canon of beauty (Pena et al., 2022).

What stuck with me most is the idea of "technological empowerment" versus just... repackaged pressure. Are filters a fun way to explore identity, or just a shortcut into the same old impossible beauty standard with extra steps? Asking for a friend (me).

Anyway. Going to go squint at my selfies and wonder what's "real" now, bye.

References

Pena, A., Morales, A., Fierrez, J., Serna, I., Ortega-Garcia, J., Puente, Í., Cordova, J., & Cordova, G. (2022). Racial bias in the beautyverse. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.13939

Sadati, M. S., Mokmeli, S., & Vasigh, M. (2023). "Filter dysmorphia": An emerging phenomenon in cosmetic dermatology. Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, 22(2), 412–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocd.15483

Smith, R., Wang, P., Salge, C., & Shin, B. (2024). Instagram face and the algorithm: How popularity-integrated recommender systems homogenize beauty standards and lower user well-being. SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4964322

Instagram face ✨