The Normalization of Facetune is Problematic

I love my dudes welcome back to internet analysis my name is Tiffany and I have a series here where I like to research and discuss and dive into various internet topics most recently I have made videos about these things and today we are gonna be talking about face tune face G tuning photoshoping face tune to Krusty so you use face tune I grew up in a time where magazines were criticized for photoshopping models and celebrities and creating this unattainable beauty standard that we talk about all the time today but face tune has brought that same kind of concept to social media and it's become so mainstream that so many influencers and celebrities face tuned their pictures online not everyone but it's definitely very common and those some people like to be open about face tuned and admit that they love to edit their pictures tweak some things or even completely change their bodies that still doesn't change that face tune is doing what Photoshop does it is creating exacerbating this problem of unattainable beauty standards so in this video I'm going to explore various kind of uses of face tune and discuss the effects that face tune and the growth and popularity of it has had on people before I dive in I want to remind you guys that I have a podcast it's called previously gifted if you would like to hear me talk about other things you can check it out shameless self promo we love it ok so these are some of the most common ways that face tune is used sometimes in combination but I'm going to keep them separate for the sake of explanation ok so the first thing would be small subtle changes I think this is what face tune likes to pretend it's main purposes can instantly zap away perceived imperfections and that is things like getting rid of blemishes or temporary imperfections smoothing out your skin a little bit making you know an oily spot in a picture look a little bit better and less shiny removing redeye these are things that don't drastically change your appearance but they do make a photo look a little bit nicer the second way that face tune is often used is to change and distort bodies this is the one that I have the most problem with and it is controversial because obviously everyone has a different opinion on where the line is drawn between what is acceptable and what's not some people think that what they do or what other people do to their own photos is none of anybody else's business but when it comes to body distortion via facetune people have become really good at it so it is very common especially with a lot of influencers on Instagram to see pictures of these impossibly slim thick people because that's kind of the body standard of this time right now you know the kardashian body and the tiny tiny waist and the bigger kind of curvy your hips that is what a lot of people use facetune to try to emulate in their pictures I began to walk my job to make it straighter I realized you know you kind of make you always go in a little bit make yourself looking I'm a bigger bomb or ever and it was so addicting one very loud and proud supporter of face tune is Tana mojo she had openly admitted to using and loving face tune which I guess is kind of good I would rather people be honest about it than pretend like they don't doctor their photos but I still don't think it's the best message to send your audience so obviously editing body and face on face tune are the most obvious uses but there's also makeup editing which I wasn't really aware of until I started researching for this but a lot of people don't like when makeup artist beauty gurus edit their Instagram pictures or their thumbnails when they're showing off a makeup look because essentially they're able to make the makeup look better than it actually looks I say the first thing that we're gonna be doing guys is just reshaping the whole face yeah just fake it till you make it it doesn't really matter if you're ugly because we can do fake plastic surgery right on our phones paint on some bronzer paint on my eyeliner and I just wanted to show you how much you can actually change yourself and so people are wondering is this a result of talent or is it just face tuned or how much of a role is face tuned having in creating this flawless makeup look so let's get into more of the impact that face tune has I think the biggest problem is when the gap between your IRL self you in reality and the digital version of yourself the Instagram face tuned version of yourself when that gap grows too wide again everyone has their own lines that they draw where they think something is too far or it's okay for them but it's undeniable that it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue the more that you use an app like facetune the more that you tweak your face or tweak your body the the worse it's going to get once you stop doing it you have to keep doing it to keep up the consistency of what you're putting out there that you look like that you don't really look like so it's like a dangerous thing was falling down the rabbit hole of everything in Edison Edison recently I've been watching a few videos from a youtuber named Sierra schultzy I think that's how it's pronounced and she's been open about previously using facetune and recently she did a Instagram experiment where she slowly began to edit her photos her body and she wanted to see if anyone would notice and if they did notice if anyone would message her or say hey this looks edited what's up like I really honestly liked this photo more before the editing but my skin is not that smooth my waist is not that small we're looking at these photos of people that we think are perfect and wishing that we looked like that when half the time it isn't even real and I think another tricky thing about facetune is the people who are really good at it the more practice you get and the more time you spend editing pictures when you learn you know not to mess with walls because things are gonna be distorted and warped and that's a dead giveaway that your face tuning people become masters of this and that makes their face tuned pictures that much more subtle and when we see a picture that doesn't seem obviously photoshopped or edited our brain does not register hey it's possible this isn't a hundred percent accurate before-and-after how crazy is that now here's the thing I understand that social media is a big part of most people's lives and I understand that people want to take good pictures they want to post things that are flattering I also understand that photography is an art taking pictures and editing pictures is an art form there are definitely ways to kind of teach yourself how to look your best in a picture you know that can be done with good lighting good angles flattering poses and that I think is a good thing to practice you know you want to be able to look your best in a picture but I personally think that manipulating and editing and changing the shapes of your body in your face is going too far again as I said this is a controversial issue and I know they're gonna be people in the comments who are like what's your problem why do you care what anybody else does why should it bother you that other people are editing their pictures I will say on a personal level I don't think it really bothers me but when I think about it as a whole it's clearly problematic to me and again this is my opinion we can have differing opinions but another big problem I have with facetune is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum when someone edits their picture changes their body changes their face tries to get rid of any possible imperfection and then shares that then it becomes not just their problem or whatever it becomes everyone's it shows up on other people's feeds obviously we are affected by what we see in our own feeds we are affected by what other people post so a face tune user may be able to handle face tuning their own pictures they may not be bothered by editing their own bodies but then posting it and sharing it might trigger other people who follow them so then it does become a problem that's more than just you how we represent ourselves online impacts other people but again I don't want to demonize this I think it's worth having discussions I think it's a lot of things that we need to talk about we need to figure out what is acceptable and what is not and how to deal with these things as a society because black mirror is the future technology is not going away it's tough because I think Instagram is one of the most toxic social media platforms that's where people are most likely to get FOMO or feel like they're not doing enough with their life or that they are not attractive enough because everything that they're scrolling through and seeing seems more exciting more luxurious more expensive and more beautiful than their own lives or themselves and it's crazy because even if you know facetune is a thing everyone might be editing their pictures a little bit this probably isn't 100% real even with that in your mind I think it's so easy to still scroll through and not remember that you don't look at every picture and assume that it's face tuned you look at every picture and assume that it's more or less real there is this short film / social media experiment video called redefine pretty by M Ford you can check it out and watch the whole video but basically the premise was to show women pictures some that were not retouched and some that were retouched to see what would happen in their brains the subjects featured in the experiment had various body image issues or maybe they had skin or acne problems that caused them to be self-conscious and when they saw retouched photos edited photos of flawless perfect people there were literally parts of their brain lighting up signaling trauma again it's a very interesting video you can watch that but I think that just goes to prove that no matter how strong you want to be mentally and it's easy to say oh I'm not affected by edited pictures I'm not affected by what I see on Instagram sometimes we can't control how we react to how our brain reacts to these images and sometimes we're not even aware of it so I think that's something to keep in mind next I want to touch on body dysmorphic disorder also known as body dysmorphia BDD is an anxiety disorder related to body image you might be given a diagnosis of BDD if you experience obsessive worries about one or more perceived flaws in your physical appearance and the flaw can not be seen by others or appears very slight now this is a very serious disorder and I'm definitely not trying to say that anyone who has some kind of a body image issue has BDD it's a very very obsessive disorder it's related to OCD and it's extreme but when I first started thinking about facetune and the impacts that it might have I definitely think there's a chance that facetune and apps like that Instagram even on its own can definitely be triggering to people who have BDD and again people with BDD do have problems looking at themselves honestly their perception of their self is completely warped so again other people may see them think they're beautiful but they don't see any of that they're not capable of seeing that I have body dysmorphic disorder and there's nothing more painful than not being able to see we really look like wouldn't be thing a mirror so basically my biggest question is if someone with BDD were to use an app like facetune and change themselves I wonder if they would ever get to a point where they would like what they see if they would like that photo and think that they looked good or if it's just not possible for them to ever reach the level of perfection that they're seeking because their self-perception is that worked that's my first question maybe it's wrong to connect this to body dysmorphia in general but I just think it's kind of a similar concept of course it's different but with body dysmorphia the person has a disconnect between what they see in their reflection and what they actually look like and I guess the connection I'm making is if people create this alternate reality of themselves in facetune on Instagram and they look at that long enough and they focus on that long enough I feel like they would have a similar disconnect they would associate themselves with that Instagram version and then when they look in the mirror they wouldn't recognize themselves and I'm saying not a person with BDD just anyone again I don't know if this is making sense I just want to learn more again I'm not in the game of wanting people to self diagnose or diagnose others or pretend like I understand BDD this is just based off of a very small amount of research so I apologize if any of this is inaccurate and if you're watching this and you have healthier or more positive associations with facetune or editing your pictures please let me know I would love to hear it again these are based on my own perceptions of this and just naturally I'm kind of against too much editing but that's just me I would love to hear all of your perspectives I actually want to do an entire series they may be my next internet analysis videos about social medias impact on mental health so I want to talk about filters and how filters also can negatively affect people's perceptions of their faces the fact that people are getting plastic surgery to look more like their face tuned or filtered self lots of other things so let me know if you guys would like to see those videos because I'm very down to make them the last big point I want to make is that I think that Gen Z is being hit the hardest by social media and the of impacts of social media and especially things like face Chan because I'm 23 I did start using social media at a young age I had a myspace when I was like 11 and then I got a Facebook sometime in middle school but gen Z who I consider myself a millennial but honestly this speaks to me this is my middle school experience in my mind Gen Z is kind of around my younger brother's age he was born in 2000 and people in his age group are so much more different than even my age group and we're only four years apart in that they really grew up in the thick of technology you know their first phones were probably iPhones like they didn't even have flip phones dude back in my day it was pretty rare for kids to be allowed to be on MySpace or Facebook at like 12 or 13 but now kids are like 6 years old with instagrams and snapchats I'm like anyway I'm just saying that their representation of themselves and their peers is different because social media has evolved and they just happen to get into it when it's at a more advanced and more edited kind of point I mean yeah myspace pictures were horrible but we weren't smoothing our skin or changing the shape of our bodies that was not normalized and now I think it is especially with a lot of the influencers that these kids look up to I mean again Tanna mojo James Charles always talks about how he uses facetune and on one hand it's good that they're honest but I don't think that they should encourage their audience that that they are not good enough and that they should get in the habit of editing their face just because maybe they think their foreheads too big or their jaw line isn't strong enough it's natural for people to have insecurities but I think I just can't imagine what it's like to be a gens II teenager or young teenager preteen and be struggling with these standards bringing it back to magazines magazines set unrealistic expectations for us we would look at the cover of magazines and go oh I wish I could be as skinny as Jennifer Aniston she's always so skinny she's the perfect woman and she's 40-something years old but now it's everywhere and even your friends even your the people you go to school with can be editing their pictures if you don't edit your pictures you feel like oh no now my pictures are gonna look so much worse in comparison comparison is always gonna make you feel bad about yourself but it's been shown that Gen Z is so much more of a digital generation obviously but that means that their digital selves are that much more important to them and their own perceptions of themselves and their peers compared to us even the people who are just a few years older I hope that made sense it's kind of a an incoherent ramblings sorry can't talk what I think about is if we let facetune remain this normalized thing and let it even advance further even the people the influencers who facetune themselves cannot live up to their own Instagram version of themselves you can't even live up to your own beauty standards it got so bad at one point but I didn't even recognize that it was me anyway this brings me to the end of the video I think I've talked myself in circles by now but basically I think we need to create boundaries when I'm thinking about having children eventually and how I will want to help them have a healthier relationship with social media because again social media is not going anywhere technology is not going anywhere if anything it's only becoming more and more prevalent so accepting that it will always exist I don't think we should accept that we should just let it have free rein and go crazy I think we as a society have to choose where that line is drawn again this is not to shame anyone who photo shops or face tunes themselves everyone has the right to do that but I don't think that face tuning a picture will ever heal the problems that you have the body image issues that you have it's never gonna make you feel better about yourself your physical real self it's just gonna make you like a picture more and then present this unattainable version of yourself I think the more and more you do that the more you will hate who you see in the mirror which is a problem face tune seems to be a very temporary solution it's kind of like it gives you a little bit of a high to make a picture perfect and that feels nice when the likes start rolling in but then you go to take pictures the next time and you see what you really look like which isn't even bad but it's just distorting what your perception of yourself is and what you think you should look like what you think you have to look like anyway I sound very preachy sorry I feel like my brain is a sponge and I have wrung it completely dry and there's just nothing left anymore so if you've watched till the end of the video please consider subscribing I will continue making Internet analysis videos and I will discuss more of social medias impacts also leave me a comment let me know what you think of face tune and where you think the line is drawn if any or if you like face tune if you personally use it let me know I love to discuss love to read your comments also follow me on Instagram for some very average pics no face - and I promise I'd be so ironic if you went there and it was all just like I'm exhausted and I'm gonna go now okay thanks bye [Applause]

Channel: tiffanyferg

Views: 1,223,692

Keywords: tiffanyferg, internet, analysis, commentary, facetune, James Charles, Tana Mongeau, Dani Mansutti, facetune like a pro, photoshop, unrealistic beauty expectations, Kardashians, slim thick, social media, instagram is toxic, instagram, toxic, Khloe Kardashian, fake, reality, Tiffany Ferguson, internet analysis, Sierra Schultzzie

Id: yJKCl1kpNr8

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/intotheflowers]

I’ve been watching Tiffany for yearsssss, love these new videos from her.

[u/PwincessButtacwup]

Thanks for sharing! Didn't think I was gonna watch a nearly 20 minute video about FaceTune tonight, but she is really captivating and made a lot of great points! I will definitely be checking out her channel.