Facetune is a popular selfie-editing app. It has tools which can make your earrings shinier, your skin smoother, the insides of your eyes whiter, and the lighting brighter or darker. It is, I believe, all right to use this app to an extent, but not to an extent of overuse.
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Zoe Schuver, a 21-year-old senior at St. Louis and an Instagram user, states that, “If [you’re editing] little things it’s fine, but you can tell when someone’s done a lot to their pictures.”
It’s hard to talk critically about this stuff — girls and young women, manipulated images, and the implicit assumption of what those images are doing to their self-esteem — without coming off as a little bit hokey, or at the very least tiresome. We’ve been discussing the evils of Photoshop for decades, and airbrushing before that, because of their negative effect on body image, with the general, agreed-upon takeaway being that yes, it is bad to narrow already-thin models’ waists or misrepresent their skin tones. Media-savvy young people are all too aware that many, if not most, of the advertisements and fashion shoots they see are altered.
Things get more complicated, though, when the bogeyman is not an anonymous evil fashion editor at a glossy magazine or the Hollywood machine. It’s women like Zoe touching up tiny flaws, and influencers plumping their lips. Facetune has allowed virtually anyone to participate in that same manipulation. It has given them the power to create a digital persona that has little to do with their actual selves.
There have been ripple effects, too: In the more than five years that Facetune has existed, it has helped give rise to an aesthetic sameness known as “Instagram Face” and produced an entire cottage industry devoted to exposing the differences between our constructed faces and our real ones. The democratization of beauty has meant that the latest, coolest filters are less about looking like pretty humans and more about looking like weird experimental cyborgs. More than any of that, Facetune has been at the center of conversations around the discrepancies between our crafted online selves and the messy realities of life inside of a body.
What are your thoughts on this one?
More details of this topic on Vox.com.
(Image Credit: ivanovgood/ Pixabay)
Source: neatorama