The gender glitch – filtered faces, real pressure

Time of India

6 days ago

She is a tech entrepreneur, author, and relentless advocate for gender equality in STEM and beyond. Over the past 20 years, she had immersed herself in the fast-paced world of technology and AI, building innovative products and leading initiatives that challenge the status quo. LESS ... MORE
A young woman in Delhi scrolls through Instagram, pausing at a selfie she just took. With a swipe, she applies a popular beauty filter. Instantly, her skin is smoothed to porcelain, her eyes enlarged, lips plumped, and nose slimmed. She barely recognises herself – this virtual version is flawless, like a digitised doll. The likes pour in when she posts it. But when she puts down the phone and glances in the mirror, a pang of disappointment hits.
The real her has pores, a crooked smile, an actual human face. How can it compete with her filtered face?
She isn't alone in this feeling. We live in an era of AI-crafted beauty, where anyone can alter their looks at will, and it's messing with our heads in profound ways.
The New Normal of 'Perfect'
Ten years ago, airbrushing was mostly for magazine models. Today, it's at everyone's fingertips. More than 500 million people use Instagram and Snapchat filters daily. Scroll through any social feed and you'll see them: subtly (or not so subtly) enhanced faces with impossibly smooth skin, sparkling eyes, even AR makeup that never smudges.
These aren't obviously fake funhouse effects. Often, they're gentle tweaks that make you 'look like yourself, but better.' The result is a creeping homogenisation of beauty. Influencers across the globe start to share an uncanny resemblance, the so-called 'Instagram Face': almond eyes, poreless skin, high cheekbones, plump lips. It's as if AI has distilled all the likes and preferences into one archetype, and we're all converging toward it.
The pressure to conform isn't just in our heads; it's reinforced by numbers and algorithms. Consider this startling fact: in cosmetic surgery clinics, doctors have reported a surge of patients requesting to look like their filtered selfies, a phenomenon so common it's dubbed 'Snapchat dysmorphia.' In one survey of plastic surgeons, 55% said patients cited the desire to look better in selfies (often meaning 'more like my filtered self') as a reason for seeking surgery – up from 42% just two years prior. Young people, bombarded by idealised images (not only of celebs but of their own friends after edits), are internalising unrealistic standards. A recent study of teen girls found that those who heavily edited their photos felt significantly worse about their bodies, linking filter use with higher body dissatisfaction. The logic is cruelly simple: if everyone online seems blemish-free and beautiful, any real flaw you have feels magnified.
The AI in Your Pocket Mirror
We've quietly outsourced beauty judgment to algorithms. Many smartphone cameras automatically apply 'beauty mode' by default, smoothing skin and brightening eyes without you even knowing. There are AI-powered apps that rate your face for attractiveness or 'fix' your selfies in one tap. On TikTok, the 'Bold Glamour' filter recently went viral for its uncanny realism; it doesn't even glitch when you cover your face; it's like a live Photoshop mask. People were both amazed and disturbed. One 20-year-old said after using it, 'I don't want to look at myself in the mirror without it.' This is the insidious effect: once you've seen the AI-perfected you, the real you might start to feel inadequate.
Instagram itself had announced a ban on some extreme face-altering filters, acknowledging the link to worsened body image in young women. But for many, the damage is already done; the concept of unfiltered reality has been altered forever.
When Beauty Gets Biased
There's another layer, one of cultural and racial bias. Beauty filters are often programmed with a certain ideal in mind, and that ideal skews light-skinned and Eurocentric. For example, AI 'beauty contests' have gone awry. In a notorious 2016 experiment, an AI judged an international beauty pageant. Of the 44 winners it selected, 42 were white or light-skinned; only one had dark skin. The algorithm wasn't explicitly racist; it was trained on data that reflected society's biases (mostly photos of light-skinned people labelled as attractive), and so it learned a distorted standard. Similarly, many filters automatically lighten skin or narrow noses – effectively digital bleaching and Westernising of features.
Users in Asia have noticed how 'beauty mode' often gives them rounder eyes and paler complexions. What message does that send? It subtly devalues the rich spectrum of human looks in favour of a cookie-cutter template. We risk bulldozing cultural notions of beauty and replacing them with a single AI-generated mould.
The Beauty 'Glitch'
Perhaps the most distressing illustration of this AI-beauty complex is how literal it's become. Not long ago, women would bring celebrity photos to plastic surgeons; now they bring filtered photos of themselves. They're chasing an edited version of their own face. It's as if we each carry an avatar of who we 'could' look like, and reality falls short.
This is a psychological pressure cooker.
One filter might be harmless fun – adding puppy ears or silly freckles – but the pervasive use of 'pretty' filters creates an expectation that you should always look that polished. A quick scroll through social media can become an exercise in self-scrutiny: why doesn't my skin glow like that, or my jawline look so sharp? We forget we're comparing ourselves to carefully curated illusions.
And it's not just women. Young men, too, feel it – perhaps seeing peers with chiselled jaw filters or buffed-up AR muscles. The difference is that women historically face more societal scrutiny on appearance, so the effects hit them hardest. For instance, over 90% of sampled Instagram beautifying filters were found to shrink the user's nose and 90% also enlarged the lips, basically enforcing a singular 'ideal' facial structure (tiny nose, big pout) on millions of images. Think about that: the code itself carries a judgment of what a 'better' face is. Little by little, it can warp our collective perception of normal.
So where do we go from here?
The genie isn't going back in the bottle. AI will only get more sophisticated at altering faces in real time. But we can change how we engage with it.
Teach media literacy early: Show teens how filters work and how they warp reality.
Encourage side-by-side posts: Some influencers now share 'filter vs. no filter' comparisons. Followers often find the unfiltered images more relatable, and even more beautiful.
Push for transparency: Countries like Norway now require influencers to label retouched photos in ads. Imagine if every filtered image had a small symbol. It could help recalibrate our expectations.
Take filter breaks: If you feel a jolt of shock seeing your real face after days of filters, you're not alone. Taking regular breaks can help reset your perception.
'The most radical act might be looking in the mirror and deciding the unfiltered you is enough.'
But, the Bigger question being..
From Victorian corsets to Bollywood's 'size zero' craze, beauty standards have always been shifting. What's new is that AI isn't just reflecting our preferences, it's actively shaping them, distilling billions of likes into a single template.
The danger? Perfect becomes synonymous with identical. And in chasing algorithmic beauty, we risk erasing the quirks, asymmetries, and cultural richness that make faces, and people unforgettable.
That's the ultimate gender glitch: when technology designed to 'enhance' ends up flattening our diversity, fuelling insecurity, and narrowing the idea of beauty until it's just one face, endlessly copied.
Maybe the most radical thing you can do in 2025 is look in the mirror, really look, and decide that the unfiltered you is enough. Not because it fits an AI's idea of perfect, but because it's yours.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.