It wasn’t way back that just about every face online looked the identical. , the Instagram Face with the graceful skin and FaceTuned features. A single, cyborgian look has been the usual for years, dominating social media feeds with its feline eye flick and dissociative pout – the sort that author Jia Tolentino once described as you “coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a non-public jet to Coachella”. Well, now it’s getting an upgrade, as we enter the era of TikTok domination. 

For today’s it-girls, it’s all about creating their very own unrealistic beauty standards for them to adapt to. “Are you cat pretty, bunny pretty, deer pretty or fox pretty?” goes the viral meme – there’s even a filter that allows you to try on each look. One other asks, “Are you high or low visual weight?” None of those categories are necessarily more prized than the others. To see yourself as ‘bunny pretty’ or ‘high visual weight’ isn’t a marker of superiority over your fellow females, but moderately the start line for the steps you have to undertake to engineer your personal self-improvement journey.

Scrolling through social media today, you’ll find countless clips suggesting glow-up suggestions catered to your facial anatomy. Whether it’s understanding the difference between “doe eyes” and “siren eyes”, or using the canthal tilt filter to work out the proper angle to your eyeliner, these micro-trends tell women, ‘Be The Best Version of Yourself’. There’s also the viral ‘are you boy pretty or girl pretty?’ debate, which breaks women down into yet more categories to distinguish between the physical traits that ladies supposedly find attractive versus what men supposedly find attractive.

That is where things begin to get a bit murky. Whether it’s ‘what pretty are you’ or your visual weight, these examples almost all the time feature women who type of all look the identical: principally, conventionally hot girls with Instagram Face whose only differences are hair color. Some people have argued that there’s an interesting, problematic distinction between the women who’re coded as ‘boy pretty’ – generally Asian and Latina – and those that are ‘girl pretty’ – white girls. But as one comment points out, “Perhaps they’re just pretty”.

By now, we all know that Gen Z likes to rebrand old trends: Clean Girl as That Girl as VSCO girl. Regurgitating the identical trend cycles under different names gives the illusion of change, making it appear fresh and exciting while still maintaining the establishment. This happens with micro-trends, for instance renaming a pale blue manicure to blueberry milk nails, and now we’re seeing it seep into categories of facial expression. Saying you’re ‘deer pretty’ or ‘boy pretty’ is a way of faking diversity while still upholding the usual hierarchical beauty standards that paved the way in which for Instagram Face in the primary place. Suggesting glow-up suggestions based in your particular beauty type reinforces the concept pretty privilege – AKA the concept the warmer you might be, the higher others treat you – is the final word social cachet. The one difference now’s that the experience is broken down into deceptively cute and silly little games, hidden beneath layers of memetic irony.

If Instagram Face is the Kardashian simulacra at the highest of your feed, TikTok Face is the synthetic beauty in your FYP. It’s the identical but different. TikTok Face’s appearance is uncanny and simply digested into algorithmic filter bubbles ready for digital consumption. The identical angelic baddie listening to subliminals (girl-coded manifestation videos) before bedtime is reconfiguring her make-up routine to best match her visual weight. She uses viral AI-powered face filters to reinforce her appearance, neatly packaging her facial expression like a text-to-image prompt, breaking her beauty down into stats to be fed back to the machine. It mirrors the way in which AI is creating hyper-personalised ad for individual users. The singular it-girl splits right into a girlswarm of it-girls each tailored to appeal to your hyper-personal consumer desires.

Sold to us as something that’s emancipatory, the concept of pretty privilege nevertheless relies on age-old beauty standards which might be, ultimately, often geared towards attracting men. The need to remain ahead of the pack feels so sigma female-coded, it’s really not that different from the millennial #girlboss, whose pink-hued online presence so heavily relies on being the Foremost Character on feed. “I actually have to be the most well liked person on the food market.” A meme depicting an ultra-cute strawberry girl is juxtaposed next to the famous quote by John Berger that reads: “Men have a look at women. Women watch themselves being checked out. This determines not only most relations between men and girls but in addition the relation of ladies to themselves.” What this implies is that woman is a living currency – the capitalist realism we subject ourselves to, where every try and break the cycle is repackaged into yet one more commodity, feels inescapable. Greater than simply ‘the male gaze’, being a lady online is inextricable from the conditions of late-capitalism – but as recent looksmaxxing trends point to, it’s not only limited to women. 

There’s after all a level of pragmatism to the breaking down of our body parts. Things that dictate your social end result akin to dating apps and social media reward those that the machine sees as desirable. Rearranging our faces by means of TikTok’s algorithm increases our visibility, bumping us to the highest of the feed and maxxing-out our market value. It’s the identical logic as “-core” or “-girl” trends that incentivise sameness on the feed. As Caitlyn Clark writes for Dazed Beauty, “TikTok trend cycles are trying to stay on the innovative of uniqueness, while flattening all types of individuality”.

If the web has taught us anything, it’s that beauty is hackable and might be achieved through the limitless modding of our facial expression through make-up, filters, photo editing and tweakments – all things that might be bought and paid for, after all. While this most definitely plays into the standardisation of our faces, hence terms like ‘iPhone Face’, there’s also appears to be a heightened awareness concerning the role the algorithm plays in shaping our behaviour each online and offline – for instance, the recent  #uncannyvalleymakeup trend, where users literally transform themselves into robotic dolls. There’s nothing fallacious with participating in online trends, but perhaps the query we must always really be asking is, who’s this actually for?