Skrzesinski and her peers are good at spotting a filtered face, but it’s getting tougher, she said. The lip-filling, eye-snatching filters that first drew attention on Snapchat and Instagram look crude compared with today’s beauty filters, some of which use artificial intelligence to reimagine your face in real time. A retouch job that might take hours on Photoshop takes seconds with TikTok’s Bold Glamour filter or Instagram’s Glow. Even decidedly grown-up software such as Zoom comes with beauty effects that apply digital brows or lip color.
Like makeup or cosmetic procedures, people say they use beauty filters to enhance their faces, hide insecurities or tap into “pretty privilege.” But the more advanced the filters get, the more intense the pushback. Filters and AI-powered face-tuning promote unrealistic and Eurocentric beauty standards, critics say. Social media companies, for their part, say filters are a tool for fun and self expression. Everyday users are caught in the middle, with young women in particular struggling to strike the socially acceptable balance between looking attractive and “being authentic.”
“If you wake up and you’re tired and you want to look like you’re not tired, that’s one thing,” Skrzesinski said, weighing when it’s okay to alter your face. “But if you wake up and you want to look like a different person that you’ve never looked like before and change the entire structure of your face, I think that that’s when it crosses the line.”
The first Snapchat beauty filter appeared in 2015, and since then, the technology has spread to Instagram, TikTok and countless other camera apps. Some beauty filters overlay freckles or eyelashes that glitch if you wave your hand in front of the camera. Others, such as TikTok’s Bold Glamour, appear to use AI to remake your face in the image of a bona fide hottie. Snapchat will now save your editing selections — such as skin smoothing — and apply them as soon as you open the camera. On the back end, easy-to-use editing apps such as Facetune or CapCut let users slim their hips or whiten their teeth with a few button taps.
People gripe about filtered images showing up on dating apps, LinkedIn profiles and everywhere in between — but it hasn’t slowed the spread of altered images. Bold Glamour has been posted 128.5 million times even as TikTok dodges questions about the effect’s use of AI. TikTok declined to comment on the technology that powers Bold Glamour, its development of beauty filters and its rules around filters. It also declined to share usage metrics or respond to critics’ claims.
Instagram’s policies ban filters that explicitly reference plastic surgery, for example by superimposing surgery lines, or that alter a user’s appearance to resemble a different ethnicity, a spokesperson for Instagram parent company Meta said. Meta declined to share metrics on filter use or respond to critics’ claims.
Snapchat’s parent company said more than 250 million people on average use filters, which it calls Lenses, every day, making for 6 billion filtered snaps. Even if a user seems to prefer beauty filters, they’ll still see a variety of filter options in the app, a spokesperson said.
For professional online creators, filters might help nab partnerships with aspirational brands, according to Jason Sizer, director of partnerships at influencer marketing agency Shuffle Presents.
More simply, they save creators time. Amber Todaro, a hairstylist and content creator in Long Island, sometimes uses a face-altering filter to save time putting on makeup, the 29-year-old said. The filter also helps her content look uniform, she added.
“When I wake up, I know. If I feel like my makeup’s not looking right or the lighting’s not right, I’ll have a filter on there to feel good, I guess,” she said.
For some posters, the filter is part of the package. Alix Earle, a lifestyle creator who grew her TikTok account from relative obscurity to millions of followers in the past year, has said in videos she applies the skin-smoothing Blue Eyes filter to much of her content, in part to cover acne. A creator who goes by Pinkydoll, famous for her “non-player character” live streams on TikTok, received pushback in August for allegedly using a filter that lightened her skin color.
Neither Earle nor Pinkydoll responded to requests for comment.
With so many eyes watching, deciding whether to use beauty filters can be fraught for creators. Sarah Palmyra, a beauty creator on Instagram and TikTok, said it’s impossible to please everyone. Avoid the filters, and viewers leave mean comments about your perceived imperfections. Apply the filter, and they criticize you for trying to hide your flaws.
“At one point I had people arguing in my comment section about whether I’d had a nose job,” Palmyra said. “It really is difficult to be out here taking all the criticism. I can understand how some creators feel like they need to put a wall up.”
The unwinnable game of online ‘authenticity’
Some critics characterize beauty filters as evidence of increasingly homogenous standards (try Googling “Instagram face”). Others position filters as a pipeline to cosmetic surgery or a risk to mental health. A 2023 report from children’s advocacy organization Common Sense Media found that 1 in 5 girls said beauty filters affect them negatively — and subjects with depressive symptoms were even more likely to identify the filters as harmful.
“We have heard from teen girls that beauty filters on apps like Snapchat and Instagram can intensify social comparison and body image issues,” said Supreet Mann, director of research at Common Sense Media.
For young people, however, beauty standards and beauty filters present a chicken-and-egg conundrum.
Rachel DeSilver, a high school sophomore in Virginia, uses filters sporadically. It would be silly to condemn beauty filters wholesale, she said — sometimes they help her feel more confident — but she’s careful not to depend on them. Authenticity is important to her, the 15-year-old said, but there’s a fine line between enhancing yourself and losing yourself, and she’s not always sure where it falls.
“I don’t think people should be like, as soon as you put on makeup or as soon as you get lip fillers you’re not yourself anymore,” she said. “But it’s the ship of Theseus question: If every single part of you gets replaced, are you yourself?”
Renee Knake Jefferson, a law professor at the University of Houston who has studied gendered double standards in the workplace, called beauty a “double bind.” Reject it, and watch your social and professional prospects shrink. Chase it, and watch people criticize your character and question your competence.
“No matter what choice we make, we can’t win,” Jefferson said.
Makeup and plastic surgery have long been at the center of cultural debates about how much self-enhancement or self-expression is too much. Now, beauty filters have their turn, and it’s important we don’t repeat past mistakes, said Rosanna Smith, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who attempts in her research to measure tricky concepts such as online authenticity. (Remember when people used to joke about going swimming on a first date to make sure their partners were still attractive without makeup? Let’s leave that rhetoric behind when it comes to beauty filters, she said.)
Parents and teachers should talk openly with kids and teens about beauty filters, said Devorah Heitner, author of the parenting book “Growing Up in Public.” Emphasize to your teen that wanting to feel attractive is normal and that a healthy use of filters should make them feel good and not bad, she said.
Help kids get comfortable accepting their “essential” selves while also exploring their “existential” selves — who they are is okay, and so is who they want to be. Unpack together the particular look the filters tend to encourage. And if filters start to take up too much brain space, it might be time for a social media break.
“You’re supposed to be sexy, but chaste. You’re supposed to be beautiful, but real. Those are unwinnable standards,” Heitner said. “And once you see that it’s unwinnable, maybe you won’t want to play.”
