Face Filters

Snapchat's sunlight Lens by adem 🛸

Face filters, also called "beauty filters" or "augmented reality face filters," are filters that alter users’ faces to “enhance” their physical appearance or add other visual effects. They use face recognition and augmented reality technology to detect facial features and apply these effects onto photos and videos in real time. Face filters are available on most photo and video-sharing social media apps, prominent examples including Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, and are often critical components of these apps’ user experiences.

Facial features vary widely from person to person, as can opinions and ideas about what makes a face beautiful. Face filters, and more specifically beauty filters, modify faces to conform to or at least more closely resemble one highly specific vision of beauty, imposing and superimposing that standard of beauty onto an innumerable number of minds and a vast range of different faces. Because face filters are as ubiquitous as social media platforms that create visual content are, ethical concerns have arisen as face filters can promote and perpetuate certain harmful biases. Concurrently, other ethical concerns linking face filters with online inauthenticity and deception have emerged as well.

History

Face filters entered mainstream social media in 2015 when Snapchat acquired the then 2-year-old Ukrainian startup Looksery and released its “Lenses” feature later that year.

Reach

Meta, which houses Facebook and Instagram, announced in 2020 that over 600 million people have used one of their AR effects at least once. A Snapchat spokesperson has shared that 200 million active users view or engage with the app’s filters, called Lenses, every day, and that they are used by more than 90% of young people in the US, France, and the UK. The popularity of face filters can also be discerned by their sheer volume; in the first year that software development kit Spark AR Studio was made available on Instagram, more than 400 thousand creators published over 1.2 million AR effects.

Types of Face Filters

Following are some general, simplified categories of face filters. These categories are not meant to be exhaustive or mutually exclusive and can share significant overlap with one or more others.

Humorous

Funny face filters can be a simple way for users to convey their lighthearted, playful moods or just have some harmless fun. Examples of humorous face filters on Snapchat are the Pear Face Lens and others that distort one’s facial proportions to a comical degree, the Chicken Nuggets Face Lens and others that superimpose a food item or other object onto one’s face save for the eyes and lips, and the Shook Lens and others that distort the image of one’s face into comical expressions.

Festive

Photo and video apps often create filters tailored to celebrate holidays, events, and other festive occasions such as New Year’s Eve, Halloween, the Olympics, and birthdays. These visual effects can be applied directly onto a user’s face or in the foreground or background of a photo or video.

Snapchat's Natural Makeup Lens by Abigail

Animal

Animal filters are a popular and varied enough group to have earned their own category; some famous ones on Snapchat include the Dog Lens, the Horse Head Lens, and the Fluffy Cat Ear Lens. The photo and video-taking and sharing app Snow also has countless iterations of cat, rabbit, and teddy bear-esque filters. Animal filters can range from cute (e.g. fuzzy cat ears and whiskers superimposed onto a face) to unsettling (e.g. a user’s human face morphing into a realistic horse face).

Sponsored

As social media platforms have been increasingly partnering with brands and companies to monetize and advertise in the digital sphere, one tactic they have developed is to create filters that promote sponsored content. These filters can promote movies (e.g. Walt Disney Studios’s Avatar Lens on Snapchat turning users’ faces into those of blue avatars), restaurants (e.g. Chipotle’s AR Snapchat lens promoting more active lifestyles and the chain’s newly launched Lifestyle Bowls), and products (e.g. Mr. Clean’s Snapchat lens advertising their deep cleaning mist Clean Freak). These filters often come with a small label tagging them as “Sponsored” that goes away once the picture or video using the filter is taken.

Beauty

Face filters can serve as an easy, automated process for users to obtain touched-up, beautified images of themselves without having to edit the photos and videos themselves. Some popular effects on beauty filters include smoothened and unblemished skin, freckles, flushed cheeks, plump lips, tanned skin, lightened skin, and sparkling eyes.

Makeup

Face filters can provide users with the opportunity to try and test out a varied selection of makeup looks. Many superimpose features such as eyelashes, eyeliner, contour, and lipstick, while also additionally enlarging the eyes and shrinking the nose and chin.

Ethical Concerns

Unrealistic Beauty Standards

Lowered self-esteem due to unhealthy comparison of oneself to edited pictures of people one sees in the media is not a new concept. However, one way in which face filters in particular can exacerbate the insecurities and distorted self-images of users is that they can cause users to not only compare themselves to the airbrushed appearances of celebrities and influencers, but to compare their real appearances against their own airbrushed images. This can cause them to idealize an impossible version of themselves and believe the illusion that their filtered, flawless faces are attainable.

Unobtrusive face filters can also perform as automated facial retouching, making it impossible to tell whether a photo uploaded on social media has been edited or not. This can set unrealistic and unattainable beauty standards and expectations for users, especially younger ones. According to one study, 77% of adolescent girls try to hide or alter at least one part of their bodies before posting an image of themselves online, and 50% believe that they do not look good enough without the aid of photo editing.

Snapchat Dysmorphia

Research has shown that face filters can “articulate maladaptive internalization of unrealistic body images and unattainable appearance standards.” The availability and accessibility of filters make it easy for users to only photograph their faces using them, and they can lead to distorted perceptions of what one should look like. This effect can be more potent with augmented reality filters than its photo counterpart called “selfie dysmorphia,” as the modification is more realistic and happens in real time.

When this phenomenon reaches an extreme, it can become something often dubbed “Snapchat dysmorphia.” Snapchat dysmorphia is a growing phenomenon where social media users seek cosmetic surgeries and procedures inspired and guided by social media filters and editing apps in order to look more like their own filtered selfies. These procedures include those that remove dark circles, alter the shape of eyebrows, and reduce the size of pores in order to create an airbrushed effect. Other common filter-based surgeries include “rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty, chin augmentation, submental liposuction or facelift surgery”. The term “Snapchat dysmorphia” is related to a mental health condition called body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), where one is obsessively focused on at least one perceived, slight, or nonexistent flaw in their physical appearance. BDD interferes with individuals’ day to day functioning as those suffering from it experience emotional distress and can spend hours fixating on their minor flaws. This condition affects one in 50 people in the United States.

Restrictive Idea of Beauty

Face filters, by function and definition, change and alter aspects of the image of one’s face, often into a socially or culturally “idealized” version of oneself. However, the way many filters are programmed to lighten skin tone, slim down faces and bodies, narrow noses, remove wrinkles, and more shows that these tools are racialized, gendered, aged, classed, abled, and normative. They implicitly communicate what kinds of faces are worthy and unworthy of being digitally displayed.

Imposing Eurocentric Ideals

A pattern can be seen that the most common changes and features beauty filters apply onto faces (such as enlarged eyes, narrowed noses, light-colored eyes) are Eurocentric. This has raised concerns in some for the impact of these filters on the self-images of people of color, as it idealizes the facial characteristics of Caucasians as the universal standard of beauty, an idea that has already taken root in many regions around the world due to the lasting effects of European colonialism. The whwitening of skin color performed by some filters have also been pointed out as being troubling and problematic.

Discrepancy Between Real and Online Faces

On a different note, ethical concerns have been raised against some users of face filters as well, as not only do face filters impact the way users perceive the physical appearance of themselves and others, they can also be used to form “fictional online identities”. As the world grows increasingly digital and digitized, there have been more occasions for people to upload their faces onto the internet. Complaints have been raised against those who post images of themselves that have been overly edited with face filters onto their dating app profiles. There are those who believe that face filters have made nearly any form of online dating to be untrustworthy, as they make it easy for anyone to alter their appearances and misrepresent how they look on their profiles, creating a discrepancy between online and real life appearances. Some go as far to label this filter-induced discrepancy as deception, as dating app users can be misled about what the people they matched with look like and may feel that the relationship was founded on a dishonest and inauthentic basis.

Potential Biometric Data Collection

Another point for concern is the amount of biometric data social media and editing app companies could be collecting and storing from its users. Both Facebook and Snapchat claim not to use the facial detection systems of their filters to collect personally identifiable data, but their privacy policies show that they reserve the right to store data from videos and photographs. Additionally, Facebook had a long history of using facial recognition for large-scale commercial use with its automatic photo tagging system, which identified and tagged people in pictures. When Meta shut down Facebook’s Face Recognition system in 2021 following a lawsuit regarding the misuse of facial recognition technology, the company deleted the facial recognition templates of over 1 billion people. Snapchat claims that pictures and messages are deleted from its servers once they are opened or expire, but that stories are stored for longer. Instagram, which collects data on what users see through the camera, stores data from photos and videos indefinitely or until the account in question is deleted. In 2021, TikTok paid $92 million to settle dozens of lawsuits that accused the company of using facial recognition technology to collect data about users such as age, gender, and ethnicity to sell the information for ad targeting.

Proponents of Face Filters

In contrast to the various ethical issues regarding face filters detailed above, there are those who argue and believe that face filters are harmless or even beneficial.

Those who believe face filters to be harmless call it a “fun tool” to make a selfie look more interesting, and that it is obvious and apparent when one is in use. Others compare using face filters to getting professional headshots retouched, and say that they are just a quick and simple way to cover small blemishes. Still others liken using face filters to other methods people use to look more presentable or attractive and enhance their appearance, such as applying makeup, wearing wigs, dyeing one’s hair, or selecting and sharing a photo taken from their most flattering angle.

Those who argue that face filters are beneficial often refer to the boost in confidence it can afford to users. These people believe that face filters do no harm as they make users feel more confident in how they look without bringing any injury to others. They posit that there is nothing wrong with wanting to look your best and feel confident, especially since the person who cares the most about how someone looks is that person themself. This thought process is akin to the logic used by those who think positively of plastic surgery. Public relations executive and social media influencer Karla Barbosa said of the subject, “If you want to tweak a photo a bit more to feel a bit more confident [...] or get a facial or botox filler to make you feel more confident [...] that’s up to the person and how they feel.”

Some experts argue that wanting to receive plastic surgery in order to look more like one’s own edited or filtered photos is an improvement from wanting to undergo a procedure to look more like another person, such as a celebrity. Another way that face filters have been argued to be a positive development is that they can be used as a tool for plastic surgery patients to more clearly and precisely articulate their desires to their surgeons.

Still others argue that the blame for the negative effects of face filters should not be put on the technology but on society for encouraging them. Florencia Solari, a creative AR technologist who is known for creating several Instagram filters, wrote in a Medium post that for her, filters are about individuality, escapism, expression, and the freedom to “explore the trans-human and the fantasy.”

Pushback Against Face Filters

As society is gradually learning and adjusting to the way face filters affect the people who use them, users and companies have started movements and campaigns to bring awareness to and counteract the harmful effects of filters and editing. Dove’s Selfie Talk campaign, part of the Dove Self-Esteem Project, aims to help cultivate body confidence in young people on social media. It includes a campaign video called “Reverse Selfie” centered around how editing apps and distorted selfies can hurt the confidence and self-esteem of young girls. The Body Shop also launched their Global Self Love Movement, additionally pledging not to overly edit their images. Intimate apparel retailer Aerie has created a hashtag called #AerieREAL, inviting their customers to upload unedited selfies with the goal of promoting body positivity. Social media users themselves have also started challenges and trends to fight against the negative influence of face filters. Some include the TikTok “no filter” challenge, the social media trend where users show their faces with then without filters, and model and makeup artist Sasha Pallari’s #filterdrop, where users share unedited pictures of their skin. As awareness and media literacy grow, so is a culture of resistance against the harmful messaging of face filters.