TikTok’s Bold Glamour filter is so good it might be bad for you. Here’s why experts are concerned

As a digital anthropologist, Rahaf Harfoush spends a lot of time online. It’s her job.

But when she opened the TikTok app a few days ago, she noticed something new: Bold Glamour, the latest TikTok filter to go viral, appeared in video after video in her feed.

She first noticed its quality — the filter reshapes faces by carving out the jawline, plumping lips, slimming down the nose and creating a shimmery, smoky eye, sharp cheekbone contour and highlight — and thought the technology behind it was “really good.”

Unlike an earlier generation of filters, this technology won’t glitch, drop or budge when users touch their face, or cover an eye. And unless you’re familiar with the filter and catch the Bold Glamour tag at the bottom of TikTok videos where it’s used, it would be difficult to realize the influencer you follow is using a filter at all.

Then Harfoush began to worry.

What effect could social media filters have on people who use them?

“This is just horrific for young people, for anybody, really,” said Harfoush, who also serves as the executive director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture, a global think tank that focuses on the impact of technology.

Sure, people of every generation had beauty standards imposed on them, but the beauty and celebrity magazines, television shows and movies that defined popular culture for Millennials or Gen Xers were external — something to gaze at, even something to aspire to. Not so with filters.

“Instead of seeing somebody who had a face that didn’t look like yours — and seeing that beauty standard as external — we’re essentially taking those beauty standards and superimposing them on our own faces,” said Harfoush. “We’re then just emphasizing this ‘lack,’ which I think is very damaging to people.”

Harfoush also noted each filter has a “bias” of what its creators think beauty looks like, and which features are worthy of inclusion. Often, there are ethnic stereotypes embedded into them, which emphasize features of Western beauty norms for femininity such as slimmer faces and softer angles, big bright eyes over eyes with fine lines.

What’s also concerning is the homogenization of beauty standards into one, said Harfoush. These filters are available for use across the world, and erase or flatten beauty standards from around the world. “All the filters look the same, so everybody using them is starting to look the same.”

What are TikTok users saying about the Bold Glamour filter?

Reactions to the Bold Glamour filter vary. Some say it shows how far filter technology has come since the days of the unnatural Snapchat dog filter that gave users cartoon dog ears and a long tongue, while others say it’s made them question their own looks in comparison to it.

“I don’t look anything like this,” said one user using the filter. “I don’t think my brain knows how to deal with looking like this one minute, and then this the next,” she said as she revealed her face without the filter on.

The implicit message, Harfoush said, is that users aren’t “good enough” without digital modifications.

In the late 2010s, experts raised concerns about “Snapchat dysmorphia,” a body-image disorder sometimes brought upon users who frequently edited their photos. And according to a study in the American Journal of Cosmetic Surgery, face-altering software can lead to users wanting to undergo facial cosmetic procedures to enhance their appearances.

In a recent report from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, it was noted that Gen Z is booking cosmetic procedures at higher rates than before, and 75 per cent of surgeons in the U.S. said they saw a spike in clients under 30 in 2022.

“That’s what’s so creepy” about filters, said Harfoush. “When it goes off, it’s reminding you of how much you don’t have.”

How did beauty filter technology get this good?

In a late February update to TikTok’s filter creation tools, Effect House, the platform announced filter creators would have access to generative AI effects like an eyebrow eraser, lip puckering and a smiling effect.

Generative effects use Generative Adversarial Networks to “generate a new human face with superficial characteristics,” Effect House wrote in a user guide about the update. “These generative effects are applied to match the skin and provide a seamless look.”

TikTok isn’t saying whether the Bold Glamour filter was created using this technology, but it is unlike any other filter users have seen to date. Harfoush thinks it’s just the beginning of a new era of digital body modification, and that filters will be increasingly difficult to detect online.

For now, TikTok labels when people are using these types of filters — which is a “good thing” — but that’s not always the case with other social media platforms, like grid posts Instagram. (Instagram Stories that use filters have a label on them telling users which filter is being used.)

When the technology becomes invisible, that’s when more problems begin to arise, Harfoush said. And “it can be really damaging if we don’t start talking about it.”

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