Jia Tolentino on 'Instagram Face' and AI-Driven Beauty Standards

Seven years ago, The New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino is widely credited with coining the term "Instagram face" to describe a beauty standard that she noticed emerging on social media among white female influencers.

"The face looked like the beauty filters that Snapchat and Instagram provided to kind of lift your cheeks, and plump your lips, and make your eyes bigger, and make your chin a little more heart-shaped," Tolentino says. "It was the kind of ... Kim Kardashian looks, like Kendall Jenner looks, like Bella Hadid looks, like Emily Ratajkowski."

Now, in her latest New Yorker piece, Tolentino argues that social media optimization of Instagram face has trickled down, resulting in a proliferation of plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures among young people chasing an AI-based beauty standard.

"The drive toward optimization that has encompassed and driven every tech industry, all of Silicon Valley, for the last 25 years, it's really come to roost in our faces and bodies and souls," she says.

Tolentino argues that what's changing isn't just our appearance, it's our relationship to reality. She notes that procedures like Botox and fillers, once associated with middle age, are now becoming popular for teenagers and young adults, with plastic surgeons reporting a significant uptick of patients under 30, and men and boys engaging in "looksmaxxing."

When every face can be optimized, filtered or surgically refined, Tolentino says the face itself begins to lose its status as evidence of a life lived. While she doesn't think there is anything immoral or wrong about changing your looks, she worries about the messages young women and girls are getting from the online world.

"If you are a young woman and you are interfacing with the internet, there is essentially no system that will tell you, 'Your face is good as it is.' And there is no end to the systems that will say, 'Improve it, perfect it,'" she says. "Our imperfection ... that's the best thing about us. That's what makes us actually human."

Tolentino is the author of the best-selling essay collection Trick Mirror.

I talked to a celebrity makeup artist who described it. He said there's a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African American influence with the lip, a Caucasian nose, a cheek structure that's predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern. And that, 10 years later, has resulted when you ask AI to generate an image, let's say, of a beautiful woman, they are almost exclusively white, thin, young, but they have those features. And so there's this erasure of other forms of faces, certainly other forms of beauty. There's this near total erasure based on what the AI, just scraping Instagram, scraping faces, scraping the kind of racial hierarchies and preferences that are built into every system in our country.

This began as kind of niche behavior among the professionally beautiful, the wealthy and famous. But the desire trickles down because those faces are necessarily visually overrepresented. And what those women do becomes, trickles into the desire for the general population. …

If you are on social media, you see the way that people's faces have become uncanny. The foreheads are freezing. The lips are plump. ... Instagram face has kind of trickled down to the general population. You can get it at your local strip mall, basically anywhere you are in the U.S., and people certainly do.

There was a 12-year-old that went viral on TikTok for her anti-aging skin routine. If you look on non-visual forms of social media like on Reddit, or on Twitter, on any place, you'll find teenagers wondering, "Should I start getting Botox? I'm 18, like I'm starting to see signs of aging." You will have 20-somethings wondering if they should get a facelift because they think they have jowls.

If you have observed the faces of the women of the second Trump administration, this is Mar-a-Lago face. It's kind of like Instagram face. It's as if the Kardashian-esque beauty standard of 2016 has ported itself 10 years later, to the seat of American power and added quite a lot of makeup to it. It's what plastic surgery used to be, where it flaunts itself, where it kind of flaunts its lack of relationship to human reality, which I find kind of funny and I find almost quaint.

There's a way in which it mirrors the actual political policy of the Trump administration, where power is displayed in proudly disconnecting from reality altogether. … It's saying that what is given, what is human, doesn't matter, I'm gonna slash it to bits and put some gold and lipstick on it. It's the equivalent of the Trump ballroom, basically, in human face form. … This is certainly not a new observation, but it's very interesting to watch people that are very much against trans health care, gender-affirming medical care, display a beauty look that is nothing if not gender-affirming. It's fundamentally gender-affirming surgery like much plastic surgery is.

I think about my own behavior as the only thing I can really control. I want her to see me valorizing the human and not trying to improve and protect and beautify myself and my life in a way where it seems like that's a priority. … I never want her to see within me that the purpose of being a woman is to be as beautiful as possible all the time and to never look old, to never change, to always look like I did when I was 26. ... I hope I can hold myself to that, for her sake.