We undoubtedly live in the social media age, with the average Brit now spending nearly two weeks (11 days and 257 hours) on various platforms each and every year.

Everyday, we see hundreds of facial and body images uploaded on sites such as Facebook and Instagram, a growing percentage of which have been altered and optimising using one or more filters. Snapchat and Instagram offer a particularly diverse range of filters, with the latter’s ‘Reels’ feature boasting an average of 791k uses alone.

We’ll explore the wider impact of such filters below, while asking whether they’re distorting social user’s views of the world.

At Transform they analysed popular online image and photo filters, looking what sort of effects each one achieves.

The research uncovered that the most popular beauty filters on Instagram right now include:

• ‘JUST FOLLOW’, which gives the user longer lashes, plumper lips and a smaller nose
• ‘Cute noise’, which gives the user plumper lips, freckles, longer lashes, glowing skin, rosy cheeks and the option to pick a different eye colour
• ‘Ariel’, which gives the user a very chiselled appearance with higher cheekbones, plumper lips, a smaller nose, arched eyebrows and longer lashes; and
• ‘Oh babe’, which gives the user rosier and higher cheekbones, a smaller nose that is highlighted at the end, longer lashes, plumper lips and dewy skin

Together these filters – which offer varying levels of facial feature alteration – boast 791k uses on Instagram Reels alone.

How Do Filters Impact Younger People?

It’s widely believed that the trend for using filters has exploded significantly during the coronavirus pandemic, as people started to spend considerable amounts of time staring at their faces on Zoom and Teams’ calls.

Certainly, this coincided with both Instagram and Snapchat recording record levels of engagement during the pandemic, with these social media platforms arguably offering the largest selection of facial filters among their contemporaries.

Then there’s standalone editing apps such as FaceTune, which reported an overall usage increase of 20% at the beginning of the pandemic and now exports an impressive one million or more filtered images on a daily basis.

Even Zoom now boasts a flawless skin filter for videos, while rising social giant TikTok has an ‘enhance’ feature that embellishes the user’s appearance.

While the demand is obvious, the long-term impact is less so. After all, the introduction and accelerated use of facial filters and image enhancement tools is starting to have a cumulative impact on our perception of beauty and what people should look like, in the same way that cosmopolitan fashion magazines once perpetuated their own narrow interpretation of beauty.

Why We Need to Maintain a Sense of Perspective

Of course, various narratives have challenged outdated notions of conventional beauty, creating more body positive imagery and a far greater acceptance of plus sized models.

Perhaps the same now needs to be done for how we perceive skin and people’s faces, as we focus on the actual role of filters as enabling people to present their best self online and boost an individual’s self-esteem (rather than underpinning an unrealistic perception of beauty and aesthetic appearance online).

In this case, the key lies with education rather than attempting to change people’s behaviour online.

More specifically, we need to ensure that people recognise the role and usage of filters online, and how such tools have an unrealistic impact on people’s faces and visages. Similarly, we need to teach young and impressionable individuals that not everything is as it seems online, and that it’s important to be careful about believing everything that you see or read.