Hira Mustafa is no stranger to the dangers of beauty filters, recalling the few quick fixes she learned to make to her pictures with a photo editing app in high school, which ultimately led to an unhealthy body image fixation.
"These were little changes, you know, and it's basically me but it's just a little bit enhanced. And then every time I went to edit one of my photos, I would have to do the same steps so it'd be a consistent image," she tells Yahoo Life. "My routine got so long, that it'd be like 10 different things that I had to do to an image of myself to match this appearance that I was building."
Mustafa, now 26 and working as a content creator in the beauty space, explains that she started to believe that the curated version of her images was what she really looked like.
"You look at yourself in the mirror, and it's a different person," she says. "You become a lot more critical of yourself and you start to nitpick at yourself to a whole different level. And I noticed myself doing that."
With the latest "Bold Glamour" filter gaining popularity on TikTok, she's worried about just how many people will experience that same feeling as a result of the pressures and prevalence of social media.
The 16.4 million videos created with the filter — which slims the nose, sculpts cheekbones, creates fuller lips, smooths skin and applies contour and smoky eyeshadow — illustrate its ubiquity. And with so many people praising how beautiful they look with the AI generated filter, it's difficult to ignore its impact on beauty standards for young people, in particular.
"Filters create an unattainable standard for beauty that can’t be matched in real life. Human beings have pores in their skin, asymmetry in their faces, wrinkles after a certain age, stretch marks, cellulite and bodies that aren't 'perfect,'" Florida-based psychologist Carolyn Rubenstein tells Yahoo Life. "When someone sees their face in a filter, that can become the standard they wish to live up to."
While the existence of a beauty standard isn't new, its pervasiveness is unique to social media.
"I was eight years old 40 years ago, and the thin ideal and beauty standards were a thing, but they were a thing that we saw maybe in movies or on TV, or at the magazine stand in the grocery store," Dr. Kimberly Dennis, chief medical officer at SunCloud Health, a mental health treatment center, tells Yahoo Life. "Kids today are getting a more intense version, a more toxic version and so, so, so much more pervasively." (...)
Angela Zhang is one TikTok creator who pointed this out in a video that has garnered seven million views as of Wednesday afternoon. She tells Yahoo Life that she found herself curious about the differences she perceived in the function of this particular filter from others.
"With the traditional filters, when you put your hand in front of your face it immediately kind of gives away that you have a filter, you have something layered on top of your face. Because you see like the lipstick tint or the eyeliner and eyelashes floating," she says. "But this filter, with all the girls and guys that were using it, people will be touching their face, they'll be putting their hand in front of their lips or trying to smudge their eyebrows and it's just like their face."
Zhang credited Luke Hurd, a TikToker who creates AR filters, for helping her understand the phenomenon. Hurd's page features his own in-depth analysis of Bold Glamour where he talks about the machine learning technology that makes it so "next level."
"This actually takes the camera image itself and then processes it. It does track your face," Hurd said in his video, noting that traditional filters simply overlay a 3D mesh that's taught to find your face within a two-dimensional screen.
"It's the most seamless," Zhang adds.
by Kerry Justich, Yahoo News | Read more:
Image: zhangsta via TikTok[ed. Late to the party again. How about a smart bathroom mirror that does the same thing first thing in the morning? See also: Why won’t TikTok confirm the Bold Glamour filter is AI? (The Verge); and, Does the 'Bold Glamour' filter push unrealistic beauty standards? TikTokkers think so (NPR).]
