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Within two years, their company, called Lightricks, had generated about $18 million in revenue from the 4.5 million downloads of Facetune, which in 2015 cost between $3 and $4, according to estimates by Business Insider. In 2013, five Israeli friends, four of whom were computer science PhD students, released an app that would let regular people edit photos of their faces. More than any of that, Facetune has been at the center of conversations around the discrepancies between our crafted online selves and the messy realities of life inside of a body. The democratization of beauty has meant that the latest, coolest filters are less about looking like pretty humans and more about looking like weird experimental cyborgs. There have been ripple effects, too: In the more than five years that Facetune has existed, it has helped give rise to an aesthetic sameness known as “Instagram Face” and produced an entire cottage industry devoted to exposing the differences between our constructed faces and our real ones. It has given them the power to create a digital persona that has little to do with their actual selves. Facetune has allowed virtually anyone to participate in that same manipulation. It’s women like Zoe touching up tiny flaws, and influencers plumping their lips. Things get more complicated, though, when the bogeyman is not an anonymous evil fashion editor at a glossy magazine or the Hollywood machine. Media-savvy young people are all too aware that many, if not most, of the advertisements and fashion shoots they see are altered.
#Power to the people images skin#
We’ve been discussing the evils of Photoshop for decades, and airbrushing before that, because of their negative effect on body image, with the general, agreed-upon takeaway being that yes, it is bad to narrow already-thin models’ waists or misrepresent their skin tones. It’s hard to talk critically about this stuff - girls and young women, manipulated images, and the implicit assumption of what those images are doing to their self-esteem - without coming off as a little bit hokey, or at the very least tiresome. Facetune is the ultimate culmination of those two forces: A cheap, easy-to-use Photoshop alternative in the pocket of anyone with a smartphone, allowing them to smooth, slim, or skew any part of their face or body in an instant. They have had access to modern technology and social media for much of their lives, and they’ve also had the power to digitally manipulate those images themselves. Zoe is part of a generation that has never known a world that isn’t filled with digitally manipulated images. If an acquaintance from school or someone in their social circle used it too heavily though? That’d be weird, she explains. Zoe says that neither she nor her friends really use Facetune much, but they see evidence of it constantly, on the Instagram accounts of influencers and celebrities. Louis: “If little things it’s fine, but you can tell when someone’s done a lot to their pictures.” Says the 21-year-old college senior in St.
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But that’s the extent of her Facetune use. There are others that smooth her skin, whiten the insides of her eyes, and adjust the lighting. There’s a tool in Facetune, the popular selfie-editing app, that Zoe Schuver uses to make her earrings look shinier.