Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe. But contemporary systems of continual visual self-broadcasting—reality TV, social media—have created new disciplines of continual visual self-improvement. Social media has supercharged the propensity to regard one’s personal identity as a potential source of profit—and, especially for young women, to regard one’s body this way, too. In October, Instagram announced that it would be removing “all effects associated with plastic surgery” from its filter arsenal, but this appears to mean all effects explicitly associated with plastic surgery, such as the ones called “Plastica” and “Fix Me”. Filters that give you Instagram Face will remain. For those born with assets—natural assets, capital assets, or both—it can seem sensible, even automatic, to think of your body the way that a McKinsey consultant would think about a corporation: identify underperforming sectors and remake them, discard whatever doesn’t increase profits and reorient the business toward whatever does.
In a world where women are rewarded for youth and beauty in a way that they are rewarded for nothing else—and where a strain of mainstream feminism teaches women that self-objectification is progressive, because it’s profitable—cosmetic work might seem like one of the few guaranteed high-yield projects that a woman could undertake.
Jia Tolentino
One of the insidious consequences of capitalism and consumerism, coupled with the pressure to perform on social media: an explosive rise of esthetic surgery designed to shape individual faces into an idealized version preferred by Instagram algorithms. A dystopic societal trend that reminds me of Brave New World with its always-happy people – happy not because they found some deeper meaning in life, but on the contrary because they renounced any higher meaning in favor of absolute shallowness (and mood-altering drugs).
Sorry I missed your call. Women on Instagram started posting their most flattering selfies in black and white and calling it an “empowerment challenge” and I threw my phone into the sea.
— Bess Kalb (@bessbell) July 27, 2020
There was something strange, I said, about the racial aspect of Instagram Face—it was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism.
Absolutely, Smith said.We’re talking an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.Did Smith think that Instagram Face was actually making people look better? He did.People are absolutely getting prettier, he said.The world is so visual right now, and it’s only getting more visual, and people want to upgrade the way they relate to it.This was an optimistic way of looking at the situation. I told Smith that I couldn’t shake the feeling that technology is rewriting our bodies to correspond to its own interests—rearranging our faces according to whatever increases engagement and likes.
Don’t you think it’s scary to imagine people doing this forever?I asked.
Well, yeah, it’s obviously terrifying, he said.
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