Marina Demeshko/iStockphoto/Getty Images seven years ago, He New Yorker Copywriter Jia Tolentino is widely credited with coining the term “Instagram face” to describe a beauty standard she noticed emerging on social media among white female influencers. “The face looked like the beauty filters that Snapchat and Instagram provided to lift the cheeks, plump the lips,
Marina Demeshko/iStockphoto/Getty Images
seven years ago, He New Yorker Copywriter Jia Tolentino is widely credited with coining the term “Instagram face” to describe a beauty standard she noticed emerging on social media among white female influencers.
“The face looked like the beauty filters that Snapchat and Instagram provided to lift the cheeks, plump the lips, enlarge the eyes, and make the chin a little more heart-shaped,” Tolentino says. “It was kind of… Kim Kardashian’s look, Kendall Jenner’s look, Bella Hadid’s look, Emily Ratajkowski’s look.”
Now in his last New Yorker In this article, Tolentino argues that Instagram face optimization on social media has leaked, resulting in a proliferation of plastic surgeries and cosmetic procedures among young people pursuing a standard of beauty based on artificial intelligence.
“The drive toward optimization that has encompassed and driven every technology industry, every Silicon Valley, for the last 25 years has really etched itself into our faces, bodies and souls,” he says.
Tolentino maintains that what is changing is not just our appearance, it is our relationship with reality. He notes that procedures such as Botox and fillers, once associated with middle age, are now becoming popular among teenagers and young adults, with plastic surgeons reporting a significant increase in patients under the age of 30, and in men and boys engaging in “looksmaxxing.”
When each face can be optimized, filtered, or surgically refined, Tolentino says the face itself begins to lose its status as evidence of a life lived. While she doesn’t think there’s anything immoral or wrong about changing your appearance, she is concerned about the messages young women and girls receive from the online world.
“If you’re a young woman and you’re interacting with the Internet, there’s essentially no system that says, ‘Your face is fine the way it is.’ And there’s no end to systems that say, ‘Improve it, perfect it,'” she says. “Our imperfection… that’s the best thing about us. That’s what makes us truly human.”
Tolentino is the author of the best-selling collection of essays mirror trick.
Interview Highlights
On how Instagram faces derive from different ethnicities
Jia Tolentino is an editor at The New Yorker.
Elena Mudd
hide title
toggle title
Elena Mudd
I spoke to a famous makeup artist who described it. He said there is a South Asian influence in the eyebrows and eye shape, an African American influence in the lips, a Caucasian nose and a predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern cheek structure. And that, 10 years later, has turned out when you ask AI to generate an image of, say, a beautiful woman, they are almost exclusively white, thin, young, but they have those features. And so there is this erasure of other forms of faces, certainly other forms of beauty. There is almost total erasure based on what AI does, just deleting Instagram, deleting faces, deleting the kind of hierarchies and racial preferences that are built into every system in our country.
On Instagram, faces shift from celebrities and influencers to the general population.
This started as a kind of niche behavior among the professionally beautiful, the rich, and the famous. But desire seeps in because those faces are necessarily visually overrepresented. And what these women do becomes a desire for the general population. …
If you are on social media, you will see how people’s faces have become strange. The foreheads are frozen. The lips are fleshy. …The face of Instagram has reached the general population. You can get it at your local mall, basically anywhere in the US, and people certainly do.
About young women and girls undergoing anti-aging procedures.
There was a 12-year-old girl who went viral on TikTok for her anti-aging skin routine. If you look at non-visual forms of social media like Reddit or Twitter, anywhere, you’ll find teenagers wondering, “Should I start getting Botox? I’m 18, like I’m starting to see signs of aging.” There will be twenty-somethings wondering if they should get a face lift because they think they have a double chin.
In so called “Mar-a-Lago face“
If you’ve looked at the faces of the women of the second Trump administration, this is the face of Mar-a-Lago. It’s like an Instagram face. It’s as if the 2016 Kardashian-style beauty standard had been moved 10 years later to the seat of American power and added a lot of makeup. It’s what plastic surgery used to be, where it flaunts itself, where it sort of flaunts its lack of relationship to human reality, which I find a little funny and almost quaint.
In some ways it reflects the real politics of the Trump administration, where power is demonstrated by proudly disconnecting from reality completely. … He’s saying that what is given, what is human, doesn’t matter, I’m going to cut it into pieces and put some gold and lipstick on it. It’s the ballroom equivalent of Trump, basically, in the form of a human face. …This is certainly not a new observation, but it is very interesting to see people who are very against trans healthcare and gender-affirming healthcare, display a semblance of beauty that is nothing more than gender-affirming. It is fundamentally gender-affirming surgery, as is much of plastic surgery.
On raising her daughter in this culture of plastic surgery and anti-aging intervention
I think my own behavior is the only thing I can really control. I want you to see me valuing the human and not trying to improve, protect and beautify myself and my life in a way that seems like a priority. … I never want her to see within me that the purpose of being a woman is to be as beautiful as possible all the time and never look old, never change, always look like I did when I was 26. … I hope I can fulfill that, for her sake.
Monique Nazareth and Nico González Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
{For more tech updates, stay tuned to our blog.|Keep following us for the latest insights.|Check back often for more exciting news!}
