I had written about it for The Realists blog and that post proved to be so popular, it still receives hundreds of visits every month… and one of the photos from the blog post appears in Google cards results for SNOW.īut SNOW took work – and time! Every change had to be selected from a long menu and users had to pick the intensity of each tweak from 0 to 100.įaceApp does everything for you at the touch of a button, in seconds. And it makes women look eerily similar. You see, I had run the same experiment three years ago using the popular South Korean app SNOW. It seems to be taunting you, asking you to spot the difference and to think deeply about what would be needed – in terms of makeup and cosmetic procedures – to attain that more beautiful look. Because it’s there! It’s you! If only you worked a little harder at that. Kylie Jenner and Khloe Kardashian are great examples of this.įaceApp has a “showcase” feature showing the before and after of the photo rendering: the before picture is framed in a small circle right below the beautiful, AI-improved pic. There is often a very stark difference between the way an influencer presents themselves on their (photo) feed versus how they look in videos, which are for now harder to retouch. Tagged photos are one thing… and then there are videos. If the subreddit Instagram Reality has taught me anything, it’s that you can easily unmask the illusions of social media by analyzing the difference between photos in one’s own feed and tagged photos (by others). I felt so silly for believing them at face value (pun intended).Īlso: Kylie Jenner in real life or in videos looks very different from the Kylie Jenner seen in photos. They are simply using the same app to tweak their photos. Using this app – and getting a glamorous makeover at the touch of a button – made me realize that the Kylie Jenner lookalikes mentioned earlier probably look nothing like Kylie Jenner in real life. So I looked it up, downloaded it and tried it. People in the comments section explained that the app this young woman used – to show the illusions of social media – was FaceApp. This week, one of the most popular posts of Instagram Reality was “ This account that post comparison of her without and with facetune to preach the word of not trusting social media“. Since discovering it, I would visit it from time to time for research for The Realists documentary, since body image and unattainable beauty ideals on social media will be a major part of the film. The Reddit community that showed that original post with 9 lookalikes was r/InstagramReality. Writer Jia Tolentino wrote about this issue for The New Yorker in a piece titled “The Age of Instagram Face”. Most of the comments on the original post lamented social media’s unattainable beauty ideals and the fact that young women seem pressured to look a certain way, resorting to lip fillers, Botox and cosmetic procedures to achieve that prized look. They looked like the same person but were in fact 9 different individuals. I’ve been unable to find the original post, but it was a grid of 9 photos showing close-ups of nine young women, who seemed to have the same flawless skin, thick eyebrows, doe-like eyes, plump lips and high cheekbones. A few years ago I came across a trending post on Reddit‘s homepage that showed how many young influencers on Instagram looked eerily alike – they seemed to be carbon copies of Kylie Jenner, aka the youngest sister of Kim Kardashian, who has cult-like following on social media.