Cultural turning points are rarely the grand, seismic events you examine in textbooks. Sure – there’s 9/11 or Obama being elected to office, but there’s also the iPhone, Caitlyn Jenner coming out, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade. And whether we prefer it or not, there are many smaller (more trivial) moments which work just as hard to maintain culture ticking. Think that Snapchat dog filter or Bella Hadid’s alleged nose job.

It’s on the intersection of those two particular phenomena that a disturbing recent trend has emerged: Instagram accounts dedicated to photoshopping celebrities and giving them imagined cosmetic procedures. Accounts like @goddess.women, @fixedyouu, and @beauty.kingdome have gained significant momentum over the past few months and now churn out day by day edits of Gen Z friendly celebs resembling Zendaya, Billie Eilish, Selena Gomez, and the Hadids. 

The edits are uncanny, eerie and, in some ways, indistinguishable from Instagram’s already pathological use of Facetune and filters. But what does the rise of those accounts say about our current relationship with body image and our perception of self? And the way will this impact their highly engaged, mostly adolescent and almost exclusively female audience?

“I really consider our appearance defines us,” says the person behind @fixedyouu (who wishes to remain anonymous). “We may not admit it but there’s an undying curiosity about what we could or could be like if we were perfect looking”. The concept of perfection is, for thus many reasons, problematic nevertheless it’s deeply embedded inside the culture of beauty – having been reflected back to us through insipid promoting campaigns, before and after tabloid spreads and celebrity ‘glow-ups’.

It’s the ‘best version of ourself’ that we’ve read via “since you’re value it” slogans and “you deserve it” messaging. Even outside of promoting, the moralistic value we assign to beauty ideals are well documented – like when taller men and slimmer women earn more than others. It’s the drained, but intoxicating, notion that being more conventionally beautiful equals happiness, wealth, and partnership. 

“I really consider our appearance defines us. We may not admit it but there’s an undying curiosity about what we could or could be like if we were perfect looking” – @fixedyouu

After all, we all know this equation to be unfaithful but when @fixedyouu reveals that: “I even have never liked my appearance and I probably never will”, it does make it all of the more powerful. The answer here, or so it’s implied by the account handle, is cosmetic surgery. Despite being a public account, @fixedyouu is seemingly only targeted “towards the cosmetic surgery community”, otherwise generally known as Instagram’s ‘Sx’ community – an undercover collective comprised of personal accounts manned by anonymous “dolls” (cosmetic surgery patients) who compile moodboards, document their surgery journeys, and share best practice tricks to other Sx members. “On this community we yearn to study recent ways of improving our appearance,’ the anonymous founder explains. “What’s great about my page is that it gives you a comparatively realistic idea of what certain surgeries would appear to be on different face shapes.” 

On this sense, the faces of celebrities (and even prison mugshots and historical figures like Frida Kahlo and Anne Boleyn) function as substitutes for their very own – they change into avatars through which the retoucher exorcises their very own insecurities. On one hand, it resembles our unboundaried relationship with celebrity, an entitlement to access and an ownership over their appearance. But on the opposite, it provides a platform for us to live out our truest fantasies digitally. Be it by the use of cosmetic surgery edits or WarNymph (Grimes’ digital avatar) and even the futuristic filter art of Ines Alpha – it’s a part of the ever growing phenomenon of wanting to look more beautiful online than in real life.

Yet what these accounts fail to acknowledge is “the true extent of the physical, emotional and psychological damage that’s brought on by people of their pursuit of beauty ideals”, says Dr Bamford of the London Centre for Eating Disorders and Body Image. This kind of “image altering fosters a way of lacking in people” which might result in “depression, anxiety, and body image dissatisfaction… a known risk factor for disordered eating”. 

Social media, alongside tabloid culture and reality TV, has supercharged and shamed the body right into a site of constant critique and self-optimisation. The dysmorphic culture of the ‘before and afters’ inherent to those accounts, are “just one other tactic utilized by the media to exacerbate people’s body dissatisfaction”. When coupled with a captioned list of ‘procedures’, they change into almost instructional. It leads to the varieties of images that the “young and vulnerable” are likely to obsess over with macabre voyeurism – each admiring and resenting those that have the physical (or financial) assets to fulfil beauty ideals. 

If being tanned, blonde, and massive boobed were the hallmarks of 00s glam, it’s now being pillow lipped, giftedly jawlined, and cat eyed. It’s something author Jia Tolentino describes as “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic” in her essay, “The Instagram Face”. Indeed, excluding light skin celebrities resembling Rihanna, Zendaya, or Beyoncé, these accounts rarely feature black or dark skin subjects. It implies that even in a world of imagined beauty, black bodies are excluded from the narrative. 

One TikTok account (@photoshoppetopia) quite rightly got here under fire for its edit of Zendaya, which gave the actress smaller lips, a slimmer nose and a narrower jawline. It was captioned “perfect facial expression”, which within the photoshop community seems mutually exclusive to Eurocentric proportions. But what’s most conflicting, is the dearth of accountability that the people behind these accounts appear to take – lots of whom refused to speak, in fear of aggravating the “hate” or the “extreme feminists” who comment on their work.

“I realise that the best way I photoshop my photos could possibly be seen as promoting a certain sort of beauty (small noses, big eyes, perfect teeth)” says the 30-something Latest Yorker behind @just.a.tweak. However it’s fair game “so long as it’s been made clear that these images have been photoshopped”. Except by that time, it’s just too late – the photographs have already change into an object of aspiration. What’s more, research from the University of Warwick has shown that flagging models as ‘enhanced’ or ‘manipulated’ (counterintuitively) increases our desire to emulate their appearance. This, in turn, widens the gap between retouched images and our very real image of self.

“It seems indicative of how the culture of beauty is moving beyond physical Beverly Hills-style procedures and mutating into something more digital, cyborgian, and (potentially) more sinister. What stays though is the damaging belief that beauty is nothing if not untouchable. Whether it is close by, then it’s simply not beautiful”

In truth, to assume that these images are only passively received by young people is to do them a disservice. These are digital natives, the overwhelming majority of whom are accustomed to their very own filtered reflections and au fait with retouching technology themselves. They’re well aware that these depictions of beauty are artificial, it’s just that many don’t care. And with comments resembling “she is so pretty” and “perfection!” on a recent post of Meghan Markle, it’s clear these users still idolise and interact with the edits as in the event that they were real. 

Within the words of @just.a.tweak, “people prefer to see beauty”. But by the hands of those particular accounts, the “art form” of photoshop becomes a hugely socially irresponsible practice. When so many accounts offer their retouching services to users via DMs, it seems indicative of how the culture of beauty is moving beyond physical Beverly Hills-style procedures and mutating into something more digital, cyborgian, and (potentially) more sinister. What stays though is the damaging belief that beauty is nothing if not untouchable. Whether it is close by, then it’s simply not beautiful.