Our generation is filled with infinite ways to communicate through social media, we can share, scroll, like, message and state our thoughts at the click of a button. With all this technology comes boundaries. We have to set limits for ourselves so we don't get too wrapped up in it all the time. With the constant presence of others fingertips waiting to compliment (or worse), congratulate (or worse), and encourage (or not), us in each endeavor we tend to feed into this and keep looking for ways to one up ourselves.
We all know this generation has a beauty standard problem, we dress up, and show out all over instagram and snapchat just to watch our like count go up. I am no exception and I love to post and look at other's posts. It's pretty easy to find a picture of ourselves we like and post it with a nice filter, but what happens when you have a blemish, or you look a little tired, but the picture is still all together decent? Well, we have an app for that too.
Recently I downloaded a photo editing app to play around with. At first I just went through some of my old pictures and adjusted the brightness, or cleaned up the under eye circles a bit. After a while though I wanted to see just how much I could change these pictures to my liking. It turns out this simple little app could make my eyes bigger ( something I have always been self conscious about), it could add eyelashes, change my eye color, smooth my skin, contour and even change the shape of my face and my nose. It was all in good fun, manipulating those pictures so they looked flawless, and i mean flawless. It looked like me, but more like a weird robot version of me.
I didn't realize how much I had changed until it was brought to my attention. These pictures didn't look like me, and you could tell. The hard part was, i liked these better. They were what I wanted to be skinnier, perfect skin, perfect eyebrows, but they weren't me and the people closest to me didn't like that. I thought to myself "What's the big deal? It's just fun" but it wasn't. I was using that app as a crush and taking perfectly good pictures and altering them until I thought the original was too horific to post.
Doing that to yourself isn't good, and I noticed it before it got out of hand. As women in today's society we compete with every magazine and advertisement around to look and be the best, when those people are just as touched up as the pictures I was editing. They're fake, and we're real women living real lives and doing incredible things. It took a serious reality check for me to snap out of the perfection zone and remember that I have more to me than perfectly combed hair.
There is so much more out there to be worried about than what you look, and apps like this can destroy someone with the highest of self esteem, so imagine what it can do to girls that already struggle in that area. These type of apps point out flaws that aren't even there. In my opinion if you have one of these dowloaded, delete it and save yourself. Remember where your true beauty comes from and don't play into the world telling you that you are less because you are different. Find a good group of friends that lifts you up for more than your cool outfits, because being shallow will only get you so far. Get rid of the app and learn how to fall in love with yourself in every way, body, mind, and spirit, because I guarantee it will make you feel more beatiful than properly lighted selfie.
