Selena Gomez has plenty of experience with social media, but there’s one aspect of the more visually driven platforms that she doesn’t love: namely, filters. Flicking through the options on Snapchat, she’d noticed that there was a pattern to all of the “pretty” filters (think the ones that make you look like a flower-crowned queen of summer). Gomez proceeded to call out how they generally lighten the user’s eye color in a way that other filters don’t—which led the brown-eyed pop star to wonder exactly why that was.
“Literally every single Snapchat filter has blue eyes,” Gomez said. “But…what if you have brown eyes? Am I supposed to have these eyes to look good?”
She ran through a few other filters to continue testing her hypothesis.
“They use my brown eyes for this one,” she said about a filter that morphs lips into an oversized, distorted version of their actual selves. “I don’t understand; they have all the blue eyes for the [filters] that are really pretty.”
The story’s since expired, but some fans made sure it lived on on Twitter:
She has a point: If massive social media giants are correlating lighter eyes with a certain standard of beauty, that’s a message that could subliminally make an impact on users—especially younger, impressionable ones. After all, it’s not uncommon for little kids to play around with their parents’ Snapchat filters. (Not to mention all the issues that Snapchat-like apps—and Snapchat itself—have had with racist filters.) We’re already seeing the impact of filters on how women perceive themselves, to the point where they’re reportedly getting cosmetic surgery to look more like the filtered versions of themselves they see on apps like Snapchat. There’s even a name for the phenomenon: “Snapchat dysmorphia.”
Gomez, it seems, might not be the biggest fan of the “pretty” filters now—she signed off implying she might stay away from them—but she certainly gives users (and, one hopes, the higher-ups at companies that use filtering features in their apps) something to think about next time they pull up a filter.
