A recent viral tweet from artist Memo Atken introduced a relatively new TikTok filter called Bold Glamour. In the tweet, Atken shares a TikTok video from Australian influencer Zoe George in which George has applied the filter, which adds defined eyebrows, eyeshadow, lashes, lip color, and contour to the user’s face—in addition to smoothing out the skin, mimicking the effect of foundation. In the video, George demonstrates how this filter, unlike previous ones, doesn’t glitch—for example, when the user moves their hand in front of their eye—which only adds to its realism. She describes the filter as scary because there are “a lot of girls out there that don’t realize when someone’s got a filter on and they’re chasing perfection because they think that’s what everyone looks like.” Media outlets across the globe have reported on the filter, with some highlighting the fact that while the filter seemingly uses AI, TikTok won’t confirm that to be the case, furthering concerns about the impacts of a relatively new area of technology.

Not everyone is alarmed by this seemingly more advanced filter: Australian Cultural Studies academic Hannah McCann, thinks the concerns are overblown. “I tried the new ‘Bold Glamour’ [filter] and it just made me look like a drag queen,” she wrote on Twitter.

While concerns about the ubiquity of filters across TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are understandable, I’m with McCann on this one—I’m not sure a filter with obvious makeup is the harbinger of doom (or, in this case, damaged self-esteem) that Bold Glamour is being made out to be. I think there are far more insidious features on TikTok that can impact the self-esteem of young users, particularly the automatic filters that can be applied without the user opting in to use them.

In 2021, MIT Technology Review reported on a bug that caused a beauty filter to be automatically applied to users’ videos without their opt-in, which they could not turn off. One creator they interviewed found that the filter subtly feminized their features, softening their skin and slimming their face. While this was a temporary issue that was acknowledged and fixed by TikTok, face-altering filters continue to be the default for South Korea-based users of the app. In an October 2021 video, Tiktoker glowwithava demonstrates the differences between how TikTok applies filters for US users compared to Korean users: even when a Korean user chooses not to apply a filter to their videos, a subtle filter is applied anyway, smoothing their skin and removing skin texture. 

A similar filter that emphasizes smooth skin has also recently gone viral. The filter, called Teenage Look, purports to show users what they looked like as teenagers by removing textures or lines, rounding the face and adding a subtle youthful glow. Instead of reflecting a realistic idea of what teenage faces look like, pimples and all, it creates an idealized vision based on societal beauty standards, much like any other beauty filter found on social media.

The Teenage Look filter creates an alternative of the user that beauty critic Jessica DeFino dubbed Meta Face. Describing Mark Zuckerberg on a Meta livestream in 2021, DeFino wrote:

“If Instagram Face is modeled after real faces augmented with fake features, Meta Face will be modeled after fake faces… period. Lifelessness is the starting point. It’s reasonable to assume that IRL Meta Face will evoke the aesthetic of computer animation: bright eyes, featureless skin, rounded noses, pink cheeks, stiff hair, defined hairlines. The overall effect is smooth and slightly cartoonish—doll-like, even—in a tech industry interpretation of the ultimate beauty ideal: youth.”

DeFino theorized that this Meta Face will come to replace Instagram Face, “the uniformly wide-eyed, smooth-skinned, pouty-lipped thing that Eve Peyser of The New York Times hilariously (and accurately) described as ‘a sexy baby meets Jessica Rabbit.’” If the Bold Glamour filter represents the Instagram Face ideal of the 2010s, Teenage Look exemplifies the Meta Face phenomenon.

The Teenage Look filter, and skin-blurring filters in general, are more insidious because they can be harder to spot. Bold Glamour, for all its flaws, makes it obvious that the user has makeup on, even if that makeup is from a filter and the name of the filter applied to the video is displayed above the poster’s username, serving as a disclaimer of sorts. Skin-blurring filters, particularly those automatically applied, don’t come with any kind of disclaimer. The same can be said for photos that are run through the popular photo editing app FaceTune. While some look comically over-edited, others are more subtle, conveying an ideal and reinforcing a beauty standard that people, particularly women, should aspire to have smooth, poreless skin devoid of signs of a life well lived.

The first generation to have grown up with filters is now entering adulthood, and the effects of the widespread normalization of filters are only now being understood. Writing in Forbes in 2021, contributor Anna Haines argues, “While making up for a makeup-less face with the occasional Instagram story filter may seem harmless, repeated use creates a new normal for how we think our faces should look.” Positive reinforcement in the form of likes and comments triggers what Dr. Jasmine Fardouly of Macquarie University’s department of psychology in Sydney, Australia, calls an “envy spiral,” creating an “airbrushed online environment that’s increasingly divorced from reality.”

In a report from MIT Technology Review, Claire Pescott, a researcher at the University of South Wales in Australia, revealed that in focus groups studying the behavior of preteens on social media, young boys found filters fun and entertaining (“I like to put on these funny ears, I like to share them with my friends and we have a laugh”), whereas young girls primarily saw them as a way to fix their appearance. Girls as young as 10 told researchers that they used filters because it gave them flawless skin by taking away their scars and spots.

In a society obsessed with youth, and one that regularly reminds women that much of their worth comes from their appearance, beauty filters that allow people to change their appearance are inevitable; they act as a quick-fix for deeper issues. An effective response should address the underlying cause—societal beauty standards—not merely the symptoms.