I was having dinner with a friend this week who was telling me she’s been hammering the gym lately because she hates her stomach. Upon my emphatic (and honest) protests that I think she’s gorgeous just as she is, she thrust forward her phone to show me a picture of [who knows, who cares] on Instagram, showing off a tiny frame with rock hard abs. I moved the conversation on, lest I awaken the dormant beast that lives inside my brain, but not before registering the frustration that comparison is still so pervasive in our culture.
I wrote previously about beauty standards throughout history, in which I referenced the Kardashians as the moniker for our aesthetic era. Of course they’re not personally responsible for the continuation of unreal body standards in modern society. We were worshipping false idols long before they had their first nose jobs. But the Kardashians have now set the bar so high for pretty much every part of a woman’s face and body, denying surgical enhancements, and becoming the poster-Klan for injectables and an obscene level of filtering.
Photo-editing is a tool available to anyone these days. What once required professional skill and expensive software is now at the touch of a smartphone. Yet given that we know how accessible these tools are, we still appear surprisingly undiscerning when it comes to online comparison.
Perhaps it’s because we’re lifelong villagers in the land of make-believe media, having ingested doctored images for years. Enduring endless visual reinforcement of unreal beauty standards. Greasing a diet industry whose greed feeds off the starvation of our self-esteem. We sort of knew, but never fully appreciated the frightening extent to which this occurred. Those photographs that looked hot off the red carpet having often been through edits and approval before being released for public consumption.
Anyone fancy a game of spot the difference? 👀
Nicole Scherzinger looking gorgeous on the left, but her waist and hips reshaped on the right. Her forehead reduced with baby hairs removed.
Serena Williams shrunk down to a tiny waist on the right. Apparently even the body of a professional athlete wasn’t good enough.
This Laila Rouass shower shot with her gorgeous body unnecessarily reshaped and smoothed (although I maybe understand editing the crotch leakage).
Rhianna, again with the waist, and again with the forehead!
..And what the media lords taketh from the women, they giveth to the men.. they even made Bieber’s hands bigger!
I chose these images specifically as they are all edits of bodies that already fit the narrow aesthetic of the prescribed ideal. So for context, if even these bodies get shaped, smoothed, plumped and enhanced before they reach the eyes of those who, like my friend, then compare themselves to these erroneous standards, is it any wonder that reportedly 91% of women are unhappy with their bodies?
We’ve consumed images like this for decades, rarely questioning the validity of presented perfection, edits so deliberately discreet they don’t register. The truth is we’re shown a perfection that even the most sculpted, personally trained, and professionally curated celebrities can’t maintain. However, in today’s social media culture where everybody has a platform, it’s no longer just celebrities that are falsely represented. A 2021 study discovered 90% of participants extensively filter their photos. And many now fear showing their unfiltered image online, causing huge anxiety for offline interactions.
I genuinely believe people should be free to do whatever they want with their own bodies and their own content. But there needs to be increased education and transparency around the lengths at which people are going in order to present their image, and an ingrained understanding in all of us about the distortion of what gets published. It’s ‘Fake News’ with facial features and a peachy ass.
The danger is that we don’t know what we don’t know, so it can be hard to wake up and smell the filter coffee if knowledge isn’t shared. Hence why it’s so impactful when celebrities take responsibility for how their image is represented. Zendaya and Lupita Nyong’o have both previously taken to Instagram to highlight the before and after of retouching, where in both cases magazines edited their appearance to what they deemed more attractive to readers. But it’s the readers that lose out here, and these posts offered their followers a small but important glimpse at truer representation.
What’s more encouraging still, is the trend emerging online to show real before and afters, and the many in-betweens, of what we see on social media. Accounts such as @josephinelivin below, who routinely posts photo edits to demonstrate the possibilities of digital enhancement, encouraging followers to question what they see online.
As well as accounts making efforts to show the difference in pre-post posing. That what we see is just one carefully positioned version of a body that’s far more relatable and just as beautiful.
Again, I think people should be able to do as they please. I’m not saying filtering is bad (who doesn’t love a good Valencia filter on the old ‘gram) but when we only see flawless or distorted versions of everyone around us, it reinforces dangerous standards of beauty that drive low self-esteem and poor mental health. The reported panic that descended on Khloe Kardashian when an unfiltered photo of her was leaked, and the lengths at which her people had to go to in order to have it removed, was incredibly sad. Despite fans reacting to say they prefer the more natural side of her, it was treated like Armageddon for the Kardashian brand, which should only remind us that we’re being sold an aspirational dud.
This is by no means an issue that just affects women. The same amount of editing applies to male bodies too, and it’s equally as important to have transparency around the reality here, including the extreme and unhealthy lengths actors are required to go to for shirtless scenes we see in film.
The issues are systemic, but as an individual we can become more discerning about the content we see, and how we perceive it. It’s my hope that as times continue to change, social media will stop being the Wild West of comparison and be used as it was originally marketed - as a platform to connect everyday people. It’s not that filters shouldn’t be used if that’s what people want, but if we acknowledge them then surely their purpose becomes redundant, acting more like a stamp of insecurity. Perhaps people will start to put down their airbrush guns, and we can give those still FaceTuning a cuddle. That’s my hope. But in the meantime, we can keep in mind the cavernous gulf between social media and offline reality. And if what we’re consuming online is making us question our own online representation, then rather than filtering our faces, perhaps we should be filtering our feeds.
The Spin
The images we see in the media are VERY rarely true representations of real life.
Lighting, angles, posing all make a difference even before any filter is applied.
We need to reframe narrow ideals of beauty and stop glamourising polished perfection to embrace real people and their beautiful bodies, whatever they look like.
Comparison culture is driven by the media in order to sell us an idea of what we need to be. Marketing ploys that profit from our quest for self-improvement. It’s important not to waste time, money and energy striving for unattainable ideals.
Adding More Weight
Ted Talk: Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection
Lili Reinhart Speaks Out on Celeb Diet Culture
Celebrities Before and After Photoshop
Celebrities who Photoshopped their own Instagram
Kardashian Photo We Were Never Meant to See
Option to Go Deeper
What’s the #NoFilter version of you?
Consider all the different parts of you, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. What’s the real you - what parts do you love, what parts do you hide? If there are parts you choose to hide, think about the core belief you hold that makes you feel that part isn’t acceptable.