💄“Blurred, Brightened, Broken: Gen Z, Filters & the Fake Face Era”📱
Be honest: how many pics did you take before posting that one selfie? And did it even make the cut without a filter? Yeah... same. 😮💨
Welcome to Gen Z’s identity crisis, brought to you by the ✨beauty filter industrial complex✨. From Instagram’s “clean girl” gloss to Snapchat’s puppy-dog dysmorphia, filters aren’t just fun add-ons anymore, they’re lowkey rewriting what we think we should look like.
Snapchat started it with those face-slimming, eye-enlarging, lip-plumping filters. Barker (2020) calls them “pretty filters with ugly implications”, because suddenly, your real face isn’t cute enough. It's giving ✨cyborg chic✨ but also... identity issues. Gen Z girls especially are feeling the pressure to match their filtered face IRL. Injectables at 19? Normalized. Nose jobs before 21? Yup. All chasing the “Instagram Face” - that same glowy, poreless, filler-heavy look that’s basically a Kardashian AI clone. 🤖💋
Rettberg (2014) explains that filters are more than just visual tweaks - they're “filtered reality,” a tool we use to see and shape ourselves. But when the filter becomes the goal, not the edit? We’re in trouble. It’s no longer “I’m enhancing my look,” it’s “I am this filtered version of me.”
What’s wild is we know it's fake. We know that no one glows like that naturally. But the pressure? Still there. Because that filtered version gets more likes. More views. More validation. 🙃
Gen Z isn’t obsessed with perfection; we’re exhausted by it. Maybe it’s time to say f**k the filter, post the pimple, and let our pixels breathe.
References:
Barker, Jessica. (2020). 'Making-up on mobile: The pretty filters and ugly implications of Snapchat'. Rettberg J.W. (2014) 'Filtered Reality'. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
