Opinion How 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' changed female body image Huawei phones come with a “beauty mode” that automatically puts a filter on your face.

Even Snapchat’s uber-popular, ostensibly playful puppy filter widened eyes, thinned faces and airbrushed skin. Instagram’s filters have smoothed our faces for years. It’s easy, it’s available and it’s being pushed down our throats. Retouching, once the purview of celebrity images in glossy magazines, has become democratized. 'Instagram Face' is instantly identifiable and coveted by social media users from a young age. Although the filtered ideal is somewhat racially ambiguous, many filters lighten and brighten the skin, exacerbating existing colorism, the MIT Technology Review reported. The filters make eyes look bigger, noses smaller, lips fuller (think: the Kardashian-Jenner clan). The beauty standard for women, she said, is both more predominant and specific than ever before: With few exceptions, women are supposed to aspire to appear firm, smooth, young and thin.īeauty filters are designed to make you look closer to that standard - but they also narrow it. Philosopher Heather Widdows argued in her book “Perfect Me” that because striving to become beautiful has become an ethical endeavor, wrapped in moral language (“You let yourself go,” “You deserve it”), it’s actually becoming harder to resist. In our increasingly visual culture, there are powerful impulses, both societal and technological, that push people into digital self-enhancement.

But it’s also hard to fault people for trying to conform to today’s pervasive social-media-driven beauty standards, especially on apps that treat us like merchandise in an online catalog. Looking different than your photo is not the best way to start an in-person date. A visibly filtered face or retouched body could turn potential matches off. On a practical level, that reasoning makes sense.

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