'TikTok's perfect face trend is a fast track to making people feel like they're not good enough'
We're taught that beauty is subjective – but is it? As part of a popular online trend, creators are editing celebrity faces to fit a 'perfect face' template. But how does it affect the audience watching it?
If you type 'perfect face' into the TikTok search bar, you'll be instantly met with hundreds of videos from a multitude of creators. They all follow a similar format: they take a front-facing photo of a popular celebrity and then place a 'perfect face' template over it, before using editing software to warp their features to fit.
They then reveal a 'before' and 'after', which in many cases shows the celebrity contrasted with a face almost unrecognisable to their own. One of the most popular of these accounts is @artgasmm, a digital artist with over 34K followers and whose videos regularly rack up millions of views.
Some of the most recent subjects include Lola Tung and Christopher Briney, stars of The Summer I Turned Pretty, and Jojo Siwa. While, together, these videos drew almost 10 million viewers, many of the commenters have expressed their upset and discomfort with the warped features.
Under Jojo's video, one wrote: 'She's a beautiful girl, don't think she needs you describing what her perfect face would be." Another said: 'Hey so let's not normalise this perfect face s**t…can you not see the damage a filter like this could do to young people???'
Viewers were also upset under the comment section of Lola Tung's video. Commenters pointed out that the actress, who is biracial, appeared more European after having the filter applied. 'Good to know having a perfect face means erasing any feature that isn't white,' one user wrote.
But where does it come from? The perfect face template is based on the 'Golden Ratio', which dates back to Ancient Greece and which is supposedly a mathematically accurate formula for beauty. It's basically an attempt to measure attractiveness through facial symmetry.
However, this Euro-centric beauty ideal often doesn't fit many different faces and (quite literally) doesn't make room for unique features. This can be incredibly problematic, especially if it's part of media women are regularly consuming.
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Saffron Hughes, a make-up artist at FalseEyelashes.co.uk, believes these videos can have a detrimental impact on women's self esteem. She says: 'These 'perfect face' edits might look slick on TikTok, but they're a fast track to making people feel like they're not good enough. As a makeup artist, I work with women every day who already feel under pressure to look a certain way, and this just adds fuel to the fire.'
She adds: 'You're taking real faces and editing them to fit a mould that doesn't actually exist in real life. Even the celebrities being edited wouldn't recognise themselves. It pushes this idea that beauty has to mean flawless skin, high cheekbones, big eyes, a tiny nose, and anything outside of that doesn't measure up.'
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