Graphic by Trinity Kendrick ‘21
By Kaveri Pillai ’23
Staff Writer
In 2015, Snapchat changed the way we looked at ourselves, literally and metaphorically. Its revolutionary camera feature Lenses allows users to edit their photographs in real-time. Festive backgrounds, animal and beautification filters have crept into our picture-taking routines, and the good old DSLR seems to have lost its magic. And so the question becomes: What is it about a camera filter that makes it so attractive to people?
3.96 billion people use social media, and it has become particularly pervasive among young people. 73 percent of Generation Z adults aged 18-23 are active Instagram users, and 63 percent of the same demographic are active Snapchat users. With such a young demographic being sucked into this sphere of virtual reality, the scrutiny toward social media has been increasing over the past two decades. The creation of Lenses, which alter people’s faces, allowing them to attain a certain look, have reified toxic societal expectations and norms that are targeted toward young girls.
These filters appeal to those who want to look conventionally attractive. The homogenization of beauty that correlates to the standardization of one type of perfection is unfortunately enforced upon many people who don’t necessarily align themselves with this restrictive canon. The “western ideal” highlights the prevalence of neo-colonialism in the 21st century, and leaves women of color like myself feeling that they need to change to be beautiful. The Instagram filter that glamorizes freckles, blue eyes and blonde hair might seem petty in this fight to accept and appreciate diversity. However, labeling such features as symbols of feminine perfection champions an archaic form of racial superiority and alienates a handful of social groups who are seen to be the antithesis to this regressive norm of beauty.
By marketing these specific facial features as the ones that personify beauty, the commodification of biological characteristics inevitably produces issues of self-esteem and low confidence in young girls. The oppressive nature of western standards of beauty are reminiscent of the obsession colonizers had with curtailing native culture and anything that appeared to be tangential to their set normative expectations.
Power shapes the gendered notion of beauty as well. The filter effects of freakishly pore-less cheeks and over-the-top doe eyes make women look like caricatures of young, unadulterated purity. The constant need to infantilize women echoes the sentiment shared with those who find it imperative to diminish women as subordinates. By equating this “childish” beauty to the facade of naive, weak and immature women being accepted and appreciated, the system succeeds at reifying the idea of perfect women being treated like infants. The “young girl” filters rob women of adulthood and diminish them to a social group that is stagnant in this race of growth — once again leaving a vulnerable and marginalized group behind when it comes to creating a universal set of expectations.
The filters that seem to give every person unnecessary chin tucks and nose jobs hammer an idea in the minds of young girls that what they look like right now is anything but perfect. The constant interfering with one’s natural body echoes the body image issue that is rampant among young people and pushes social media users to go down this dark route of treacherous surgeries and constant cynicism regarding their bodies.
The hyper-sexualization of women of color appears to contrast the white ideal of perfection that still manages to alienate groups as “exotic” and “abnormal.” As Alizeh Azhar ’23 says, “These dark skin tone filters really do a lot of damage to young brown girls who want to achieve this stature of normalcy when they are being targeted for looking different.”
As I go through these filters now, I can’t stop myself from thinking about my 13-year-old sister who is being directed by social media to look a certain way in order to be accepted by the world. This toxic wave of artificial appearance has engulfed an entire age group, and it is important to challenge the discourse that surrounds the approval of such ideals of perfection to ensure that the pedagogy that exists regarding beauty standards is flipped.