I had a really weird experience with this filter. I tried it because of all the buzz, and the result was so disturbing that I quickly deleted it, and my best friend / partner told me he deleted it because it actually unsettled him. It beefed up my brows, enlarged my mouth, and placed blush and bronzer in ways that made me look weirdly "hard." Multiple men had exactly the same reaction to it: that the filter made me look like a guy. Another man said that when he saw the "improved" version of my face, the image was so absurd that he literally laughed out loud. I'm really not sure what the algorithm was thinking....

Meanwhile, I also tried the "Teen" filter (I'm an older millennial) and found it weird: it removed the anemic dark circles I have under my eyes (which I had since I was a kid — DEFINITELY had them in my teen years too), narrowed my jaw (my jaw was likewise always wide), and inexplicably gave me an auxiliary set of lips in the inner corners, no matter what my facial expression was.... which was freaky. The rest of my face looked largely the same.

In any case, I completely agree with you: to the extent that these filters are becoming the norm, I fear for our future. I've known men who didn't even grow up being imprinted by these kinds of images yet they already expect women to look exactly like the contoured, coiffed, and posed images on TikTok and in IG stills — even when those same models will occasionally post "real face" or " real body" photos that look nothing like their own split-second "best." It annoys me that so many guys expect unnatural faces and bodies, and it saddens me that girls and women are suffering from those expectations. Thanks for drawing attention to this.