As many cell phone users may already be aware, Samsung's new phones all come with a feature called, "beauty face." That means when you take pictures of yourself, you can enhance and even dramatically change the look of your face in photographs to make it more appealing.
You may be wondering, "What's wrong with my normal face?"
Well, apparently lots of things. For example, your skin probably has at least a few wrinkles or blemishes. One must get rid of those with a convenient perfect skin feature that air brushes your face. Now, if your eyes are too small, you can make them bigger, and if your face is too fat, you can slim that sucker down.
And.... voila! Perfection in your photographs has been achieved.
But, does this feature make us more satisfied with our looks, even when it's not necessarily in the realm of reality?
Perhaps.
In this day and age, when we have so many people seemingly concerned about girls and boys growing up with low self-esteem and poor body image, it's quite a paradox that the technology we are gifting upon the upcoming generations comes with a feature that can change the way they look into something that fits a certain beauty standard.
Now, of course, I am not attempting to slam this particular feature that Samsung has provided, and there's no doubt that the beauty face option is massively entertaining and fun for taking pictures with. I'm simply wondering why it is that certain features still reign supreme for being the most attractive?
Why are bigger eyes more attractive? Why is air brushed, perfect skin a necessity? Why do we need slimmer faces?
I thought as a species, we had made some big strides in humanizing beauty standards. We have more plus-sized models now, more movie stars with visible "flaws" such as freckles, scars, and crooked teeth. Many actors and actresses today don't fit the "ideal" beauty standards of the past, and as a whole it seems society has started to become more flexible in it's idea of what is beautiful.
But, hold on- maybe not. With the "beauty face" phenomenon it seems we're right back where we started. Back to editing ourselves into what we're not. Many people complain that social media is fake, and the status updates people post are just staged snapshots of their otherwise uninteresting lives.
So, then, why are we still subscribing to the old predictable beauty standards? And why are many of us so willing to post edited, enhanced photos of ourselves?
Is it just our insatiable egos that need to be fed compliments and likes? Are we just an incurably insecure society that's sick from the desire to fit a particular beauty standard?
It will be interesting to see how far technology will take it in the future when it comes to beauty and the way we see and present ourselves in the virtual world. It may even get to the point where when we meet people in real life we may not actually recognize them compared to their virtual profiles.
Perhaps we're there already.
Only time will tell.
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