BEAUTY AND THE ONLINE BEAST Challenging social media’s widespread use of filters, and its role in setting unrealistic beauty standards, is an urgent necessity, argues Alexander Poli (Year 12)
and even starved of water, a notable example being Chris Hemsworth in Thor : Ragnarok, who would dehydrate for a day and a half before shooting to make his muscles appear ‘denser and harder’. Yet even this kind of ex- treme regime is not enough. Photographs and videos are masterfully lit to gloss over every blemish, and the final product is airbrushed and edited until it’s debatable as to whether it portrays the subject, or an artist’s impression. All of this has an obvious psychological effect on people – especially young people who are still in their develop- mental stages. Teenagers are pushing their bodies, to an unhealthy extent, to conform to standards they could never reach without intense intervention. And that’s where
social media comes in: people who are misguided by the media’s bag of tricks into hating themselves don virtual masks, and become just another link in the social chain. This needs to stop. The media must be pressurised to ad- vocate for healthy body standards. The example France set in its 2017 ban of unhealthily thin models should be followed by governments, and we as individuals need to stop buying into it. I implore you not to layer your photo- graphs with filters or airbrush, but to look at the people around you and realise that none of you – none of us – are perfect. We are all human: it is our variety which we should be celebrating, rather than trying to imitate a single standard of so-called beauty. ◎
L ike most people my age, I’m fairly prone to scrolling through TikTok whenever I have a spare minute. Who isn’t? The app is designed to keep you scroll- ing, its 30-second video format providing the user with a way to absorb a greater variety of content in 30 minutes than they might in several hours, were they watching, say, a film or documentary. The average TikTok user spends 70 minutes a day on the app, and I’d say that a not insig- nificant proportion of users probably spend quite a bit longer. So what’s so bad about TikTok? Many have point- ed to its supposed negative effects, such as the likelihood that it shortens attention spans, but in a world of snapshot advertisements and attention-grabbing media, that’s not unusual. The real issue is far more insidious.
featuring people almost all of whom have had filters applied for every aspect – lighting, complexion, even facial shape. The images of these people are, by modern beauty standards, flawless. The danger is obvious: people at their most malleable stage of life are having a constant stream of unattainable standards etched into their minds, subtly degrading their self-esteem while incentivising them to apply filters themselves, perpetuating the vicious cycle of insecurity. Physical standards have been around since time imme- morial, originally for good reason: the person with the greatest muscle mass would be the best spear-hunter; a more well-built individual would have been able to ward off the cold in a northern region. As advances in civilisa- tion meant that human desirability was less purely related to survivability, beauty standards shifted away from utility. In Homer’s Iliad the repeated use of the epithet ‘white-armed’ to describe beautiful characters points to a beauty standard based partially around leisure. Societal notions of what is perceived to be attractive continued to change up until the modern era, when, initially due to the rise of the silver screen and then the emergence of other visual media, beauty standards became almost entirely unrelated to our ability to survive. This is the point at which the issue really takes root, with the image of per- fection coming from meticulously designed media which use every last trick in the book to enhance the look of the stars it touts. Actors are powdered, put on extreme diets Meticulously designed media which use every last trick in the book to enhance the look of the stars it touts
Teenagers are pushing their bodies, to an unhealthy extent, to conform to standards they could never reach without intense intervention
The average TikTok user spends 70 minutes a day on the app
A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through the app. Open- ing the camera to try a new gimmicky feature, I noticed something – my skin was looking unusually clear. I realised with some concern that a ‘beauty filter’ was active – one I had never applied. As I am staunchly anti-filter, I could only conclude that TikTok had automatically applied it to smoothen my skin. In consternation, I did some research and realised that this was no one-off: TikTok automatical- ly adds filters to its camera, with variation from country to country. This is concerning. Of course, filters have been in use on social media since its genesis, but the way in which TikTok is using them as a matter of course is deeply damaging. For hours, young people scroll through videos
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