“Magic mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
It’s a story as old as time: women and girls struggle with their self-image and compare themselves to their peers.
After all, social comparison is a fundamentally human instinct. But in a disturbing departure from the past, today’s social media technology has supercharged our natural obsession with beauty, and the results are chilling.
I would know.
As older Gen Zers, my generation was the first to grow up fully connected to social media, and as platforms changed, my peers followed suit.
I created my Instagram account when I was just 11 and watched social media evolve from a digital forum for innocently shared photos of beautiful sunsets and outlandish dishes to an arena for full-fledged social struggles.
Apparently everyone felt the need to keep up with the digital Joneses by posting provocative and revealing photos of themselves engaged in the most expensive and glamorous activities possible.
Gen Z has developed a dual sense of self: the real and the digital. And as we absorbed these unrealistic versions of each other, we became increasingly dissatisfied with the real person staring back from our mirrors.
“Catwoman” Jocelyn Wildenstein, 82, is pictured at an event (left) in 2020 with no edits or filters. At right is a heavily filtered snap posted to her Instagram
Who is really the fairest of them all? Real me or Instagram me?
Social media hadn’t morphed into the beast it is when I started, but I do worry about girls just a few years younger than me whose feeds have always been saturated with altered images.
I was fortunate to have a few extra years of wisdom and life experience under my belt as influencers flourished and rampant photoshopped took over social media platforms.
But still, I can recall moments in my tween years when I felt less than holding my evolving frame to standards of beauty that were not only unrealistic, but often literally unreal, thanks to digital touch-ups.
The situation has only gotten worse since then, and the latest culprits in making today’s young girls increasingly miserable are filters.
Do you have a big pimple? No problem, delete it in your post.
Do you think your face looks too big? Don’t worry, trim digitally.
Want whiter teeth, stronger cheekbones? Easy as pie, filters have you covered.
Literally.
These instant photo editing lenses can be applied to images and videos in real-time on most major social media platforms including Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, virtually transforming users’ faces.
To illustrate how dramatically they can change a user’s appearance, I applied three of the most popular Instagram filters to my own face and compared them to the unedited version of myself.
Author Rikki Schlott tries out Instagram’s face filters. Social media technology has amplified our natural obsession with beauty, and the results are terrifying
It’s me, but it’s not. It’s a distorted version.
The images are crowd-sourced amalgamations of what are considered ideal features: cat eyes, a smaller nose, narrower chin, contoured cheeks, plump lips, and a pore-free complexion.
The end product is something called an “Instagram face.” A Frankenstein mashup, and like the monster, this power has taken on a life of its own.
Of course, changing photos is nothing new. Airbrush models used to grace advertisements and magazine covers.
Different is the ability to change one’s appearance, which only came into vogue in the mid-2010s with an image-editing app called Facetune.
It all started quite innocently when Snapchat introduced the technology in 2015 and users could turn their faces into a cute dog or make it look like rainbows were coming out of their mouths.
Since then it’s been downhill.
Almost every Kardashian, for example, has been involved in a photoshopped scandal.
Like Kim, who was recently exposed for bizarrely photoshopping her trapezius muscle from photos to make her neck appear longer. Or Khloe, who was often slammed for filtering her four-year-old daughter’s face.
And the phenomenon transcends generations, as exemplified by 82-year-old Jocelyn Wildenstein, often dubbed “Catwoman,” who recently made headlines with a heavily filtered photo from New York Fashion Week.
Instagram accounts like @celebface and @beauty.false expose celebrities and influencers altering their photos. Each has more than a million followers.
Author Rikki Schlott writes that altering photos is nothing new, but different is the ability to change one’s appearance, which only became fashionable in the mid-2010s
The images are crowd-sourced amalgamations of what are considered ideal features: cat eyes, a smaller nose, narrower chin, contoured cheeks, plump lips, and a pore-free complexion
Now, the use of social media filters among young girls is widespread, according to Dove’s Self-Esteem Project, which surveyed 1,551 girls ages 10 to 17 and 2,528 mothers between February and April 2022.
The survey found that more than half of the girls used filters on a daily basis, with four in five admitting to having digitally altered their appearance before the age of 13.
This should be cause for concern.
As more people — particularly young girls — struggle to come to terms with their actual appearance, they’re developing a phenomenon researchers call “Snapchat dysmorphia.” Dysmorphia is an obsession with perceived flaws.
Meta, which owns Instagram, has conducted internal research showing that “teens blame Instagram for increases in anxiety and depression” and that the platform “impairs body image in one in three girls.”
In fact, 42 percent of young people today believe that social media is bad for their mental health.
Studies from around the world have consistently pointed to a link between social media use and poor self-image, particularly among young girls.
Indian researchers analyzed hundreds of subjects and found that groups who used filtered and altered selfies experienced decreased self-confidence and feelings of physical attractiveness, while at the same time they experienced increased feelings of social anxiety and an increased desire to undergo cosmetic surgery, experienced – a trend that was particularly widespread among women.
In 2018, 55 percent of cosmetic surgeons said patients had told them that looking better in selfies was a motivation to go under the knife.
New York City cosmetic surgeon Lara Devgan told CNN that about half of the people who show up for consultations arrive with digitally altered photos of themselves that they want to replicate in real life.
There have even been reports of plastic surgeons using Snapchat in the operating room.
I don’t think big tech moguls are conspiring in some backroom to destroy teenage girls’ sanity — but it’s clear that they’re doing very little to stop these trends.
After all, their technology has successfully hijacked the brains of an entire generation, and now their business model depends on keeping young people glued to their screens.
Social media isn’t going away anytime soon, and it’s unrealistic to ask Gen Z to completely disconnect from the digital world, given that online connectivity is critical to making and maintaining friendships in our modern age.
But parents of young girls who are struggling to develop self-confidence should be particularly mindful of how social media can impact their children’s mental health.
At the end of the day, it’s not the beauty of the digital avatar that counts. We all need to look in the mirror and love the real person we see looking back.