Let’s Talk About Our Love-Hate Relationship With Beauty Filters

glamour.com:

touch of rosiness, and all the features of the woman that you will never be, no matter how hard you try, no matter what makeup you use, no matter what–” On the phone, KP says that the genius of filters is that they make you feel worse, but they’re still addictive. “It gives you the features of the woman you will never be.

It feels hurtful to look in your own eyes and see them be so different." And yet! . “It’s very Narcissus looking in a river,” KP says, of seeing herself under the filter’s effect.Beauty filters want us all to look the same, which is, to look vaguely white, wealthy, and thin. “I noticed that a lot that are used to make you look conventionally pretty have been making me look lighter,” says Diamond, a 29-year-old whose Instagram Reel demonstrating this phenomenon went viral. “Even the ones that look like they’re kind of evening out your blemishes, they’re still making my skin lighter.” Some filters, she notes, don’t lighten her skin but they make her nose bridge higher, or lighten her eyes. “It’s all to fit the European standard of beauty,” she says. “I feel like there’s a lot of different other types of beauty.”This content can also be viewed on the site it from.Some anti-beauty filter videos, like Diamond’s, call out the exclusive, racialized values behind the filters.

Even when they don’t, these videos represent overwhelming numbers of women jumping on social media to call out a mechanism that makes women’s lives worse.

Many of these women would not regularly make content that could be labeled as negative or divisive and avoid politics altogether.