Caroline Enterfeldt just discovered a creepy corner of the internet where Instagram users photoshop people's kids to have different features, Buzzfeed reports.
After Enterfeldt posted a photo of her one-year-old daughter Jayden to an Instagram account dedicated to her, she noticed the same picture popping up on several aggregator Instagram accounts — except with blue eyes instead of brown ones.
The 27-year-old mom and others who noticed the photos are upset: not just because social media users are fetishizing and gaining publicity through other people's kids, but more troublingly because they're editing the pictures to conform to unrealistic beauty standards.
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"I'm so confident with my daughter's beauty, and for me she's perfect as she is," Enterfeldt told Buzzfeed. "When it turned out to be this big, I'm starting to think why they edited it and for what purpose."
YouTuber Laila Loves similarly tweeted, "I'm SICK of seeing people edit pictures of babies to what they believe social media will find 'cuter.' She's beautiful with her brown eyes!"
Here's the original photo of Jayden on vacation in Italy that Enterfeldt posted to her account, @Lilcocooo.
Here's the edited version that's been making its way around the internet.
A woman who runs one of the accounts that posted the photo deleted her account after the picture sparked criticism. She told Buzzfeed she is black herself and didn't know the photo was edited when she shared it. "It was not my goal. It was a mistake which I learned from," she said. "People thought that it was me who had made the editing, or that I approved the photoshop on a baby."
She said she found the photo on @dailyshqip, an account full of edited pictures of kids. It sometimes shares two different versions of a photo side-by-side and asks followers which kid is cuter. Like Enterfeldt and Loves, many commenters are pointing out how problematic it can be to suggest kids — or anyone — would be more beautiful with different characteristics.