What the Face?

I never paid attention to most Instagram filters until last week. Aside from me and my kids liking to pretend we have bunny noses and dog ears from time to time, they haven’t been a thing for me. I didn’t find out until last year that some people really do regularly facetune their selfies or use Lightroom to give themselves Beyonce quality lighting routinely. Anyway, I was scrolling through Reels last week at 9 PM as I do and kept seeing one where women were saying the filter was ridiculous and catfishy and I got to thinking. I put the filter on my face and she looked nothing like me. She was no doubt hot but she was not me. Then I saw an IG story of someone I used to know in actual life say something to the effect of “I know guys. Right? No makeup over here today. I’m keeping it real for you.” But she was using a filter. That made her face all airbrushed and lit pretty. Then I got angry.

First, why are we using filters as a matter of routine? Why do we say things like “oh boy, I’m glad I have a filter, y’all don’t want to see what I really look like today”? None of it makes sense to me. Your face is your face. When someone meets you in person they see your face. They might see a face with meticulously applied makeup but it’s still your face. No amount of makeup can approximate the sweet ass filter face look so people are seeing the actual you. Are you afraid that you don’t look good enough to have your actual face viewed by other people? And in what gets my the most upset, why are you flat out lying about your “no makeup” face when you have a filter full of glowy gorgeous makeup on it? It’s the lying for me that sends me over the edge.

We live in a time even before COVID where we see a lot of people over a screen rather than in person. Add in the past two years and unless we are authentically both in word and in face who we actually are in real life, what are we trying to accomplish? The particular person who set me one the edge owns a business that sells fitness products and her particular brand promotes women accepting themselves and loving their bodies. That message sounds awesome, but when you aren’t putting your actual face with it to back up your message, my next thought is, are you photoshopping your body too? What in the world? 

Growing up in the age on Teen and Seventeen magazines, I regularly remember hearing and reading about the unrealistic images teen girls see in the media and how it could and did warp the expectations we had for ourselves around body and beauty. People who aren’t standard sized have to struggle to find clothing because brands refuse to make clothes that fit them, which makes absolutely no sense economically because all people need clothes and they are missing out on a whole market because of some warped sense of their status in the fashion world. But that’s a different post. This thing where we can instantly transform our faces and then act like this is who we really are not only affects how other people see us but how we see ourselves.

We all have a vision of how our face looks on any given day, hell, at any given minute of the day. If we look at a warped version of our face every day, it’s likely that we might actually start to believe that we should look the way a computer shapes us to be. And that’s just not possible. There’s no dermatologist or plastic surgeon that can apply just the right amount of filler constantly and consistently to get that computer generated face. It ain’t gonna happen. That’s a good thing. Your face was made exactly the way it was made because that’s what you’re supposed to look like. If the reason you’re trying to change it has anything to do with what other people think of you, I’d like to throw this out there. Most people are way more focused on their own shit to care what you look like. If anything, there might be people who look at you because they are jealous of some aspect of your personality, but it’s highly unlikely that they are silently criticizing your face. 

I do not love everything about my face. I’ve had forehead wrinkles, no lie, since I was 12. I assume it’s because of anxiety and the fact that I scrunch up my face when I’m stressed. The forehead wrinkles remind me of the anxiety and the panic attacks that came later and they piss me off because when I look at them, I see the girl who got headaches a lot and had constant shoulder and back pain because of stress. I don’t miss that part of me at all and I don’t like looking at the reminder every day. Not one person ever has commented to me about those wrinkles. Not now, not in middle and high school, not in any relationship ever. I assume people see them because people have eyes, but not a one person has anything to say about them. They see them, but they either don’t really notice them or they just don’t care. There’s nothing wrong with disliking a feature of your face. There’s nothing wrong with trying to change it or having a procedure done to permanently change it if that’s your jam, just please do not lie about it. 

When we say your body, your choice, I take that to heart. I or anyone else should not get to tell you what to put on or in your body at any time, what to add or remove at your discretion. Please do not feel the need to lie about it though, whatever it is. In this case, lying is not actively choosing not to share personal information with other people. Having boundaries and keeping whatever information you with private is wonderful and should be celebrated. Actively lying is not ok. There should be no shame in whatever you decide to do, but putting a false persona of your actual face out into the world and then claiming it’s your “no makeup” face just makes you a liar. When you lie, you lose your integrity and if you don’t have your integrity what do you have? 

Thanks for listening. I appreciate if you read this and I would love to hear your thoughts about the topic of face filters, why we use them, what they do to our brains, and how it all fits together. I want to have a conversation and hopefully understand what’s going on better. I hope you’ve had a peaceful start to the week and that I hear from you soon. Happy Monday!