At her residency in Las Vegas last Sunday, Adele posed for a selfie with a fan. There was nothing weird about it. Until she saw what the fan's phone camera settings had done to her face. It wasn't Adele as we know her. This Adele, staring back at the singer from the phone, had orange-tinged skin and a chiseled jaw. Her lips were comically large, her eyes bright blue. "Oh my god, what have you done to my face?" Adele exclaimed. "We don't look like that, darling!" She'd been filtered against her will.
When Instagram was first launched in 2010, its two imagealtering filters were named "Miami" and "Sepia" - they changed the colours of the images put through their system, if not the actual subjects themselves. Now, however, filters have taken on a different function, with built-in technology able to warp individual facial features at the press of a button. "Coloured eyes", a popular filter, airbrushes the subject's skin, gives them plumper lips and rosier cheeks. Your eye colour could be changed to an aquamarine blue or a bright violet. Most popular filters raise your cheekbones, as if you've had dermal filler injected into your face. What's more, TikTok's "skinny filter" can make your body look slimmer. Instagram's "perfect face" (yes, really) adjusts facial features to be abnormally symmetrical.
Like Adele, my face has also been filtered against my will. Last summer, a friend asked to take a picture together at a house party. I obliged. In the photo, my cheeks looked as though an elf with tiny hands had pinched them and pulled them up vertically.
This story is from the December 01, 2022 edition of The Independent.
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This story is from the December 01, 2022 edition of The Independent.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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