We're So Over The Instagram Face

If you’ve been on Instagram over the past few years, you’ve probably noticed that many famous and fame-adjacent women have morphed into the same phenotype: artificially plumped lips, carved out cheekbones, frozen foreheads, jaws that could cut glass. Telling them apart is an impossible feat, thanks to their identical dermal fillers, Botox injections, and cosmetic surgery. The result is swathes of women who look like a cross between a Kardashian and a video game avatar.

This copy-and-paste appearance has been coined “Instagram face,” not only because it’s found everywhere on the app, but also because social media is what made it so popular in the first place. Everyone wants to look like the women who go viral, either so they can go viral as well or to meet the standard of beauty all their favorite influencers are setting. But what does it say about our culture that we’ve propped up such an artificial ideal? How long are we going to let the Instagram face reign over us?

The Rise of Instagram Face

People in the spotlight getting work done is nothing new. Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe famously changed their looks to make it in Hollywood. Victoria Beckham and Pamela Anderson participated in the dramatic breast augmentations of the ‘90s. But what sets Instagram face apart is that it’s never been more normalized for regular, everyday people to get the same cosmetic enhancements as the stars they look up to. 

In an essay titled “The Class Politics of Instagram Face,” Grazie Sophia Christie writes that this newly adopted “uniform suite of cosmetic procedures … distinguishes itself by sheer reproducibility.” Nowadays, you can go to any filler injector in Los Angeles and request the “Kylie Jenner package.” You can even bring a photo of Meghan Markle to a plastic surgeon and ask to have her nose carved out of your own (yes, people actually do that).

In this climate, faces go in and out of style like old clothes. The surgical “fox eye” lift was all the rage during the pandemic. Then came the buccal fat removal trend that sank a thousand youthful faces. This year, it’s all about blepharoplasties, which remove skin from the eyelids to achieve a more contoured eye area. Plastic surgeons with increasingly large social media followings intensify the message that the girl in the mirror is someone to dissect, to cut, to destroy.

Instagram face is a visible manifestation of social media’s effect on young women’s psyche and the dramatic lengths they’ll go to in order to feel like they fit in.

In addition, the girls chasing these procedures are getting younger and younger. Gen Z is the first to experience social media and all its pressures in our most formative years, and we haven’t emerged unscathed. I was 10 years old when Kylie Jenner (who has affected Gen Z’s relationship to cosmetic procedures more than anyone else) admitted to using dermal fillers. When I was in high school, my friends fantasized about buying her face. After we graduated, some of them did. It’s jarring when a face that you watched develop through the years is suddenly altered. My friends are no less beautiful now but have lost a unique element of themselves, replaced by the uniformity of Instagram face.

Cosmetic Enhancement: Empowering or Demeaning?

An unfortunate maxim of 21st-century feminism says that any decision a woman makes is empowering simply because she chose to make it. According to this precept, freshly 18-year-old girls running to get fillers injected are empowering (not harming) themselves. If you point out that this isn’t actually true, you’re accused of “not being a girl’s girl.” How dare you insinuate that it’s not a form of rebellion against the patriarchy to chase an artificial beauty standard? How dare you imply that wanting to transplant someone else’s face onto your own might not be totally healthy?

Whether or not someone changes the way they look with these procedures is, of course, a matter of free will. But to pretend that these choices are made in a vacuum is willful ignorance. Instagram face is a visible manifestation of social media’s effect on young women’s psyche and the dramatic lengths they’ll go to in order to feel like they fit in.

After all, if we were living in rural medieval communities where we never laid eyes on anyone outside our villages, we wouldn’t pick our appearances apart so acutely. Thanks to modern technology, we analyze ourselves too much. As the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote in The Book of Disquiet, “Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”

Bye-Bye, Instagram Face

The Instagram face has had a chokehold on our culture for years, but its grip is finally starting to weaken. While human beings are naturally inclined to beauty, there’s a certain point where things start veering toward the uncanny valley. In terms of cosmetic enhancements, we passed that point long ago. We’ve had our fill of the Instagram face, and now we’re hungry for natural beauty again.

What the fall of the Instagram face reminds us is that no beauty in the world can compete with the naturally occurring kind. This is most obvious when young women use fillers meant to restore lost volume in mature faces. When a 60 year old uses these fillers, she hopes that she’ll look 40. When a 20 year old uses these fillers, she also looks 40. In their quest for unnatural symmetry, girls have aged themselves before their time. It’s insanity when you think about it. Why would you pay to look worse?

Trying to achieve someone else’s features instead of highlighting the best of your own is a recipe for even lower self-esteem. 

This realization is likely why those who are still getting work done have become more tepid in their requests at the doctor’s office. Intense transformations have been swapped for “tweakments,” or less extreme procedures meant to look more natural than traditional plastic surgery. It’s a return to the midcentury philosophy that cosmetic work should never be obvious to anyone who didn’t know you before the fact.

Just as the Instagram face had its rise and fall, tweakments likely will too. What will we be left with then? Hopefully, some radical self-acceptance. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve your appearance and become more beautiful, but trying to achieve someone else’s features instead of highlighting the best of your own is a recipe for even lower self-esteem. 

It’s common that someone’s first plastic surgery is like a gateway drug – they think that if they just get this one singular procedure, they’ll finally like the way they look. But once they get a hit, they need even more, and return to the doctor to change something else soon enough. The cycle continues, which is how we end up with the overtly botched Instagram faces we now see everywhere. What these women needed was never plastic surgery, but a little appreciation for the girl in the mirror.

Closing Thoughts

The most outstanding element of female beauty is how wholly diverse it is. Women of all ethnicities, body types, heights, etc. possess a unique natural beauty that’s theirs alone. Chasing a face that belongs to someone else (or doesn’t exist naturally at all) blinds us to the beauty that we already have – the beauty that we don’t need to pay someone else to inject inside us.

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