In the age of Instagram Face, has the internet been warping our perceptions of what looks good in real life?
There’s something weighty and dark shifting under the surface of my self-perception of late – have you noticed it too? It lurks behind the mirror as I hesitantly approve of my daily outfit; it follows me around as I start to feel increasingly uncomfortable around a sea of sameness; it rears its viscous teeth upon the quick snap of a selfie. Suddenly, what I thought looked good in real life, no longer holds up online. In the age of Instagram Face, can someone like me make it in fashion without the lurid appeal of a little jab here and there? Or does my natural, non-Botoxed, anti-injectable visage deliver just too much strangeness for an algorithm based on the bell curve?
There’s no question that the internet has become an endless scroll of perfectly primped faces and iterative ego-death. Meanwhile, the discussion about the increasing sameness of celebrity faces has hit fever pitch, centred around the normalisation of Botox and fillers as everyday beauty treatments – as if they were simply another addition to your daily routine, perched upon your bathroom counter alongside your cleanser and toner. But there’s a broader discussion to be had about the rapid injection (pun intended) of technology into our subconscious desires and the role of algorithms in influencing our self-perceptions.
Are our choices influencing technology’s constantly changing algorithm? Or is the algorithm influencing the ways in which we cut, fill, form and shape our very bodies? Culture critics like myself are increasingly feeling like it may be shifting towards the latter. For, as The New Yorker so elegantly puts it in their ode to Instagram Face, “technology is rewriting our bodies to correspond to its own interests – rearranging our faces according to whatever increases engagement and likes… online metrics [that] push us toward a generic sameness.”
The idea of emulating others in the pursuit of perfection admittedly isn’t a new one. Women – and I say women, because in the US alone, the $16 billion plastic surgery industry sees 92% of those procedures performed on women, so it’s clear that this is a highly gendered discussion – have been quietly pushing pictures of their favourite actress across the desk of their “day spa” for decades now. But when those celebrities all start to look the same, does that make us all look the same too?
Part of what has prompted the push towards the pursuit of the Golden Ratio (I don’t have room for it here, but many-a critic has linked the idea of facial symmetry to N*zi ideals) is the normalisation of fillers and Botox on social media. It was surely a natural progression from the rampant rise of filters across our feeds – for why swipe a filter when you can just look like that in real life and save the effort?
I understand the shortcut; but we’ve become so accustomed to seeing altered faces, we’re beginning to internalise their natural unusualness as normality. And while we’re on the topic – which I will say is a biased read of the trend from someone who sees the beauty industry as a pile of capitalist sentiment layered on top of marketing the idea that you’re not good enough – I’m also starting to think that these ‘perfect’ faces are looking stranger than fiction IRL. So, are we changing our face to fit in on Instagram… but forgetting how we actually look in real life?
It even extends into our clothing. The proliferation of minimalism and oversized clothing these past few years has dominated the algorithm because of the way it presents in photos (on very thin influencers). These days, do we prioritise dressing for what looks good in photos, or what generates likes? Or are we dressing for ourselves? Perhaps we only have to look to the huge success of Skims, centred around Kim Kardashian’s attempt to make every woman in her own image, to answer that question.
Is it really wise to let a computer tell us what is beautiful? To brainwash us into cutting our skin and violently reforming it into its own idealised image of humanity based on a popularity algorithm? Personally, I read a lot of sci-fi, and all the great books that start with this storyline rarely end well.
After all, it wasn’t a computer that warned us: these violent delights have violent ends.
Bianca O’Neill is a freelance journalist with bylines at Rolling Stone Magazine, Refinery29, The Age, Herald Sun, Yahoo Lifestyle, and more. Follow her on Substack or Instagram.
