“They think they can just push the bump of their nose,” she says. She notices instantly when people use the “liquefy” tool to morph certain parts of their body or face. Lena Abujbara, a professional retoucher who has worked with brands such as Nike and Sephora, says she can easily spot amateur retouching. On Perfect365, make-up application tools, especially for the eyes, have long been most in demand.Įven the most deft users of the apps don’t go to anywhere near the extremes that professionals do for adverts or magazine covers. FaceTune says its most frequently used tools are teeth whitening, skin smoothing and reshaping the face or facial features, such as slimming a jawline or nose. Mobile apps mirror the type of editing that professional retouchers routinely employ. Rather than reject that, we’ve embraced it.
Technology has set a new standard for beauty that quite literally doesn’t exist in real life. Instead of rejecting the falsehoods we’ve made it part of our daily lives, crafting idealised digital versions of ourselves that feel like an essential corollary to real life. We grew up with airbrushing and Photoshop and saw the exposés of flawless magazine cover stars who weren’t flawless at all. The latest iPhone’s portrait mode automatically modifies images of people by blurring out the background.įor my generation, editing your own image has become as routine as using social media. Other popular retouching apps include Kim Kardashian’s favourite, Perfect365, which like FaceTune is for brushing up selfies, and VSCO and Snapseed for photos of all kinds. Retouching photos has become so commonplace that FaceTune isn’t just an app to millennials – it’s a verb.
Since the success of the first iteration it has launched a new, more sophisticated version, FaceTune 2, which encourages users to pay a monthly subscription for special tools such as simulated studio lighting.
FaceTune launched in 2013 and counts 40m daily active users, a majority of them female. I now have five on my phone solely dedicated to photo editing. Once I saw how easy and satisfying it was to polish my image – and that most of my friends were already doing so – I downloaded more apps. Then I felt good enough about my appearance to post it. So I downloaded the app, cleared up my freckles and whitened my teeth. After all, fashion journalists are now expected to have a face-forward social media presence. One day soon after Beaut圜on, I had almost decided against posting a photo of myself when I remembered my friend’s digital lipstick and realised I could use FaceTune on my own picture. But it’s equally likely that I don’t post many photos because I don’t like the way I look, particularly when I compare myself with the other glamorous people on the site. I thought this was because I wanted to be the kind of Instagram user who didn’t seem like a narcissist (if such a person even exists). I’ve always felt self-conscious about posting photos of myself to Instagram. So the beauty editor demonstrated how she could add more make-up, change the shape of her face and even the size of her features with a few finger strokes. But I had no idea that my mobile phone offered similar tools. Having worked in magazines I was well aware of the tortuous digital enhancement many cover shots endure before they hit the newsstands. People have been retouching images since the dawn of photography.
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