In the world today, selfies are quite common. Don't get me wrong, I love taking selfies and getting that perfect angle in for my next Instagram post. I mean, who doesn't?
Now that Snapchat has been around for a few years, it keeps progressing — just as every other social media does. Some progress faster than others, but I think it is fair to say that Snapchat has been a game-changer. Ever since they released their face filters in January of 2015, people started to go crazy, myself included.
They were so great in the beginning, you could have no makeup on but no problem! The filter options seemed to be endless and to get better as the days passed by. Now, here we are in 2018. Three years after the face filters were released by someone who everyone must have thought was a pure genius.
We can all agree that the filters are great, right? None of this is meant to belittle Snapchat or its filters. It is solely the truth.
Now for a second, stop what you are doing. Think.
Think hard. When was the last time you took a selfie on your phone? No face filter on Snapchat or on Instagram. Just a plain ol' selfie for the camera roll? Exactly. It has been a while.
Do not worry, I am sure we are all in the same boat. Everyone wants to look cute in a selfie, right? But you can, without a Snapchat filter — or any filter — anyway.
An article was featured on USA Today, headlined "Fight the filter: Snapchat selfie distorts users' self-image."
In the article, they discuss how certain filters like the flower crown smooth skin, change the nose shape, jaw profile, eye shape and more.
On other sites, I have seen that people have actually spent thousands of dollars on plastic surgery in order to try to achieve a real-life appearance of how the filters made them look.
If you cannot tell, the more filters added on Snapchat, the more dangerous it can get. Of course, you are not going to stop using Snapchat and its filters anytime soon, but that does not mean you cannot take a regular selfie.
No one needs a filter to enhance their beauty they have been given.
We cannot let Snapchat change the way we see beauty, let's stop the insidious influence of it once and for all.
