Do not look into an edited version of yourself, at least don't stare at it for too long.
Neutrinos pass through the screen and pierce through your eyes and body, you won't sense it, quadrillions of them pierce through everything every millisecond, but nothing can ever make you see, smell or taste it. It's merely invisible to our naked eyes, but What is REAL to our naked eye and sensible is how are you dealing with this cultural practice and need for imitation?
Staring at your "eccentric" looking face for too long, things start to look more distorted, your eyes drooping down your face too much, your forehead is too big, you have been called names for having so, your jaw feels dislocated, your nose is not thin enough.
Before 2015s, Selfie culture seemed like a phenomenon that would just come and go like the whole fad about wearing bright-colored tights and headbands in the '80s. But What people have not noticed is that later on, an epidemic like no other would have the ability to destroy one's mental health, and that leads to complications thus leading to neuropathy. Denying Covid's existence has a strange congruency towards how we brush off and deny the selfie culture's self-destructive consequences.
With the rise of editing apps, which enables others to shift features to look more like someone else they want to imitate, you then realize they almost all look the same, Cloning could be a dystopian term, but with the allowance of customizing how your face looks, it doesn't seem so far from reality. Everyone starts to want to look the same. Though unsurprisingly, colorism is a factor similar to what I am talking about, a very common issue in our current social construct, eurocentrism enabled the standardization and preferring of "lighter-skinned" people, also preferring euro-centric features such as the nose, and eyes. Leading to people consuming and altering and doing what they can to get rid of their ethnic features just to imitate.
The evolved selfie culture post-2016 does seem revolutionary, but in truth, we are currently undergoing a face editing meltdown. As nothing can destroy a human more than their deteriorating mental wellbeing. Physical attributions became the staple of self-esteem since the early 20s, women and men tend to get more suicidal if they were not born "beautiful" when in truth it's the standardization of these attributions brought people standing in lines just to imitate.
With digitalization, everyone gets to partake. So this grave needs to imitate the "influencer" is nothing but a common pattern in consumer behavior. Take it like the demand for steroids becomes soo high, that numerous people could face side effects and damage in the long run, and that could either be under half or even more than have of the consumers who used steroids.
The cover photo is done by me.
