Demi Lovato [1] often speaks to the pressures [2] of social media, but recently she decided to address the harmful effects of Instagram Story filters. On March 1, Lovato created a reel using one of the app's "beauty filters" and called attention to the unrealistic" beauty expectations [3] it promotes.
The video shows Lovato posing and smiling but the text on the reel reads "unrealistic beauty exceptions w these filters got me like" and lists off "these aren't my real eyes," "my skin is not this smooth [4]," "wait do I need a smaller nose?!," and "but can I always look like this?"
The filter slimmed down her nose, lifted her cheekbones, smoothed her skin to give it an airbrushed finish, and plumped her lips to make them look fuller. This is just one filter out of the thousands that do more of the same thing: distort your face to make it look more like society's idea of what's beautiful.
Back when filters first debuted on Snapchat, they included options that were filled with goofy emojis or turned you into a dog but now "beauty filters" have been created with the purpose of making us look like ourselves, just "better." These filters make us tanner, thinner, with more pronounced features, and blur any signs of real skin.
"Thank God I'm realising this now and I'm sorry for using them w/o realising how dangerous they were before," continued the writing on Lovato's reel. "Thank God these weren't around when I was 13 but also . . . how are teens supposed to learn to accept themselves with this sh*t."
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