IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
While we see social media and computer graphics (or even augmented reality) as tools that allow us to explore new ways of expressing beauty and the possibilities of the human body transmuted by technology, such experiments do not always lead to a path of emancipation, inclusion, or the exploration of new ways of existing.
In reality, on a more distributed level, what is happening is that social media is cementing a code of appearance and beauty standards that ends up being stereotyped by the logic of the digital influencer market (which itself becomes a caricature in the case of virtual influencers). In other words, what Instagram and Snapchat filters, or editing apps like Facetune and YouCam, have generated are new types of body image disorders that are now sustained not just by the post-production of an image or video, but have become a real-time intervention.
Last week, Veja São Paulo reported the case of Maisie Hazelwood, a 19-year-old university student who began to hate her own reflection due to the habit of taking selfies using effects. According to the report, Maisie even had trouble looking in the mirror and getting out of bed because of her low self-esteem. In an interview with the Daily Mail, the student confessed that she had downloaded the mobile apps to use the filters so she could take selfies without makeup. “They made me look prettier. My favorite was the one that made my eyelashes look longer. My face was flawless—any pimple or blemish would disappear. I fell in love with how I looked in the app and forgot about reality.”
As a result, Maisie stopped wearing makeup and stayed in bed because she could no longer bear to look in the mirror. “I hated what I saw. I isolated myself from the world; I wouldn’t let anyone visit me because I thought people would laugh at how ugly I was compared to my online selfies,” she reveals. “The app was perfect for taking a quick selfie before leaving the house because the filters corrected everything I didn’t like about my face. The fact that I couldn’t get out of bed for fear of seeing myself without the edits was something I never expected to happen because of an app.”
For Maisie to realize her condition, her family had to ask for recent photos, which made her notice that there wasn't a single unfiltered photograph, as she had been doing this for a year. By deleting the app and starting to take selfies with her phone's standard camera, the student began to recover: “I want to warn people not to let their natural beauty get lost in a world of filters.”
However, not everyone reaches this awakening and awareness of a habit that, ultimately, distorts their own image and directly affects their self-esteem and perception of their place in the world. In some countries and specific circles, such as China and South Korea, the beauty standard is not only perfectionist but can only be achieved artificially. While countries like France are creating legal instruments to curb the manipulation of photographs used in fashion advertisements, we see the reaction to campaigns like the one recently launched by Zara.
Chinese model Jing Wen was invited to promote a new line of cosmetics for the Spanish brand, but when her images were posted on the social network Sina Weibo the week before last, the reaction from Chinese consumers was to criticize the presence of freckles in the model's unretouched photos. Both in China and Korea, the beauty ideal has focused on pale, spotless skin, hence the discomfort with the image of a model with freckles in an advertising campaign.
As reported by CNN, Some users even accused Zara of making the model look "ugly" to present a negative and unrepresentative portrait of what an Asian woman is. Others said that using a model with freckles ends up "defaming" the country, just as, a few months ago, Dolce & Gabbana faced criticism for running a campaign featuring a Chinese model struggling to eat Italian food with chopsticks. "After seeing this ad, I decided not to buy any more Zara products. Not because I think the model is ugly, but because it discriminates against how Asians view the ideal of beauty," one user declared.
But despite this, some users also defended the model and the campaign, stating that "everyone has a different understanding of what beauty is, and we don't need to have the same aesthetic notion, but we need to make room for different faces." Others even claimed that the model looked much more beautiful than manipulated and retouched faces: "Please, don't live with filters. Isn't it good to be real?"
With the rise of K-pop idols, the national habit of undergoing surgical interventions to approach an ideal of beauty—which is explored, for example, by Grace Neutral in her series for Vice i-D—also comes into focus. Upon visiting Korea and talking to different people, the model began to understand how the topic of plastic surgery is a constant in cultural products, such as soap operas and movies, and how this type of procedure is performed at a very young age. In a report by the website Hypeness, we discovered that some parents even gift their children plastic surgery before they even enter college.
According to plastic surgeon Man Koon Suh, this attitude has to do with the fact that the country places so much importance on the first impression a person makes. "Since most Koreans have hooded eyelids, they believe this gives them a look of sadness. The way found to reverse the hooded eye was precisely through plastic surgery in the area, which costs between $1,000 and $3,000." Another point argued is that people considered more beautiful also have more opportunities to position themselves not only in the job market but also in society as a whole. That is, the body and especially the face are a differentiator in the social perception of people, and this is a theme explored in the film Beautiful (2008), which dramatically demonstrates the consequences of this national obsession with beauty.
But it is precisely because of this expertise in plastic surgery that different women and men from other countries go to South Korea to undergo interventions that, however, can be so drastic that people end up becoming unrecognizable. Also with a dramatic look, bordering on horror, the film Time by South Korean director Kim Ki-duk portrays the story of a woman who undergoes surgical interventions to transform herself into another person and, thus, win back her ex-boyfriend. Despite being a hyperbolic example, aren't people who undergo extreme surgical procedures also trying to win back society and the way it sees them?
New South Korean movements, however, have sought a way to deconstruct and criticize this extremism and these beauty stereotypes that unfold in makeup, plastic surgery, and the use of editing apps. Among K-pop idols, apps like Snow have gained popularity as a way to slim the face or make the skin lighter and more uniform, for example. But if, on one hand, these idols end up reinforcing an artificial beauty standard, they are also helping in the deconstruction of the male ideal of beauty associated with virility, since they bring with them a new perspective on what it means to be a man, even if subjugated to certain "rules" of vanity already well known to women.
In an interview with The GuardianCha Ji-won, who supports this movement against South Korean beauty standards, reveals that giving up makeup felt like being born again: “A person has a lot of energy every day, and I used to spend almost all of mine worrying about ‘being pretty.’ Now I use that time and energy to read and exercise.”
In the West, meanwhile, as we focus on addressing body positivity or body neutrality as a whole, we are also seeing other movements to deconstruct beauty through hashtags like those associated with Acne Fashion. Likewise, we are also in the process of deconstructing and exploring these new technologies, whether digital (apps), medical (surgeries), or chemical (makeup), especially since they are rooted in traditions and views much older than the advertising and marketing industry.
In the case of Korea, for example, the use of makeup and the idea of paleness as a sign of nobility dates back at least 700 years—a concept also present in European culture in contrast to the tanned skin of peasants and slaves. In Brazil, we continue to fight against the devaluation of Black beauty while also trying to overcome a history largely defined by a period of slavery and the exclusion of Afro-descendants. What remains for us, therefore, is to become aware of these issues and strive not to reproduce these old paradigms, so that we may pave a future where people's existence and potential are not strictly tied to their bodies and physical appearance— especially since, in the Metaverse, we will all be avatars.
