Beauty filters not only do what they’re supposed to – make people look more attractive in photos – but they also make people appear more intelligent, trustworthy, sociable and happy, according to new research.
For a study published in the British scientific academy The Royal Society, participants were shown only one version of a face, either the original or a version enhanced with a common beauty filter in, order to avoid bias.
Participants, who were given no indication if an image had been altered or not, consistently rated software-modified faces more favourably across a variety of characteristic traits.
For the study, which was conducted by Spanish researchers, 2,748 participants evaluated images of the faces of 462 different men and women.
But despite their advantages, beauty filters – ubiquitous on social media and pre-installed in many smartphone camera apps – are highly controversial and often met with criticism, particularly from the scientific community.
Read more: TikTok can cause negative internalisation of beauty ideals, says study
“Beauty filters feed our sense of beauty with unrealistically embellished faces that cause the prototype to move further and further away from real faces,” says Helmut Leder, Professor of General and Cognitive Psychology at the University of Vienna, where he founded the research focus Empirical Aesthetics in 2004.
“In the long term, this leads to real faces being rated as less and less attractive, and the standards for what a face needs to fulfil to be considered beautiful are almost unrealistically high,” Leder says.
Not only are other faces perceived as less attractive, but so is one’s own.
“When it comes to oneself, this can of course also have consequences for one’s self-image and the associated self-confidence.”
Furthermore, filters can often lead to people feeling they need cosmetic surgery or similar procedures. – dpa
