PERSONAL ESSAYS
F a i d e M l a i c So
I
can’t remember a period when there weren’t any filters available. People’s appearances have changed since the introduction of filters on social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Your beautiful skin, white teeth, and big lips make you look like you’ve just stepped off the operating table. You become so used to seeing yourself through all of these filters that you become lost in that reality, that façade; you begin to see yourself in a different light, and everything you once loved about yourself becomes a force field of negativity that overpowers you. When you grow up in an era where influencers manipulate their audiences into believing that they were born perfect when, in truth, every single photo they post on Instagram is highly edited to make them look perfect, it’s easy to believe that they were born perfect. Instagram is not reality; people in the real world do not appear as they do on Instagram. Yet, as a high school student, you slowly become accustomed to that “look” and begin to question your own appearance as did I.
e d a c a By Guillermo Hernandez Senior Staff Writer
see anything wrong with it. It seemed normal to me. I was using these filters on a daily basis without realizing that once they were removed, every shot I took without them would be considered bad. It wasn’t going to be posted if it wasn’t perfect. Every photo my friends took of me had to be approved by me. “Put a filter on it,” I’d urge. It got to the point where I didn’t like certain features of myself, but after a few years, I was fine with it. I wanted beautiful skin [no pores, acne, discoloration, or dark circles], perfect straight teeth, a nose job to make my nose smaller, I wanted to improve everything about myself, but I didn’t have the money, so I turned to the apps that provided me the one thing I needed: perfection.
“It got to the
point where I didn’t like certain features of myself.”
It all started small for me. Snapchat announced a new update named “snapchat lenses” during my freshman year of high school, a set of filters that were first wacky and fun to send to friends, family, and loved ones. I’d use the filters to send random pictures to my friends or put on my Snapchat story. What could possibly go wrong if everyone was using these filters, I thought?
During this time, I was really into youtube, and I started noticing that the youtubers I was watching were promoting this new app called “facetune.” You can use this app to hide a pimple or slim your face. To put it differently, this app makes you into someone you’re not. Everything around me was filters and apps that transformed your image, including Instagram, Snapchat, and now Face-tune, and I didn’t
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HORIZONS Spring 2022
Social media is a lie; people pretend to be happy all of the time when they aren’t. They care about what other people think of them, until I decided I wasn’t going to fall for it anymore. I noticed something was wrong when I would take photos with my friends, or family members. They didn’t use filters for every photo, they didn’t edit themselves to be picture perfect. I realized that what I was doing was not normal. I knew that I needed to reset my brain, my habits, the way I saw myself.
I began by using my camera, which didn’t have any face-changing filters, which was difficult at first because I was hungry to tweak my skin. I started posting pictures that didn’t have any filters applied to them. I tried to let go of the negative mindset; I stopped judging my skin and tried not to pick myself apart; from my skin to my nose to my teeth, I tried to be comfortable with myself as God created me. It didn’t happen overnight, but I eventually stopped using the facetune app, which had the most impact. The app allowed me to tweak
