I’m sure all of us have some experience with makeup. Cosmetics. Facepaint. Etc.

Whether you choose to wear it, or know someone who does, makeup such as eyeliner, mascara, blush, among other things, can be use to accentuate your natural features or change the way you look entirely. But should your self worth be reliant on your makeup? I’d assume many people would say no, but I for one have definitely experienced body dysmorphia when it came to seeing myself without eyeliner. The large bulbous eyes I once thought looked normal, looked completely naked and alien without thick dark strokes of black liner around them. I would purposely squint and worsen my eyesight on purpose if I wasn’t wearing eyeliner in public as a middle schooler, so my eyes might look more defined. Why on earth did I do that lmfao…Anyways, the eyeliner that I put on gave me a way to change my face in an attainable way. I was in control, and while it did make me do some questionable things, I had the power to put it on and make myself look the way I wanted if I chose to. Instagram and Snapchat filters are an entirely different thing.

It’s happened to us all, you’re innocently scrolling through your phone when you see a beautiful person on social media. The nice hair, the sharp features, perfect teeth, it’s all there. And you think “Damn, I wish I looked like that”. So you slide over to the camera and take a look. Meh….but then you put on a filter. And your eyes light up. Beautiful skin, amazing makeup, the eyes the lips, the nose. This is what you wanted to look like. This is what you should look like. You snap a couple photos, admiring yourself in the camera. In fact you start to feel more confident, this is basically what you look like anyways. It looks good! That is until the filter comes off, and a completely different face appears. Your face… your actual face. Without the filter. “Who the absolute hell is that ugly fuck staring back at me.”. But you didn’t think of yourself that way before. Before you just thought you were meh. Social media filters change the shapes and angles of our faces to often give us Eurocentric features, and k-beauty inspired makeup overlaid on top of that. The way our faces look through these filters are not attainable through makeup alone, they require extensive plastic surgery, fillers, and botox to name a few things. There is no way physically possible that every single social media user can have similar faces, yet when it comes to most influencers they do. And the truth is, many of them use not only extensive makeup, but face changing filters as well. The absolute shit this would have caused me to feel in middle school is immeasurable, but I can’t imagine what it’s doing to other young people online at the moment. In fact it still causes extreme body dysmorphia to see myself once the filter comes off. Oh well, it’s just something we have to live with now I guess.