The Complexity Of Ageing During The Airbrush Era

Snapchat and Instagram were my main social media platforms growing up in the 2010s. Most photos from my teen years are filtered or edited in some way, and as I scroll through them, it's been really disconcerting to see how clear my skin was, how small my nose was, how big my eyes were — but were they? 

Right now, I’m 26, nearly 27 (which my 18-year-old sister tells me is basically 30).  My skin isn’t as resilient as it used to be, and I’m feeling the pressure to use retinol to banish any fine lines (so far, I’m successfully resisting — but only just). I’ve gone up two, sometimes three dress sizes in recent years, my eyelashes are not what they used to be and while I have no evidence of it, I’m convinced my lips have gotten smaller. “Is it a lack of collagen production as I age?”, the skincare-pilled part of me asks. The piece of me that knows this is a damaging line of thought for someone in their mid-twenties throws her phone into the bin.

I know that certain brands want me to feel insecure, that this dread and anxiety in my chest powers a multi-billion dollar beauty industry that needs me to run into its arms and ask it to fix me. I know this in my head, yet I can’t stop my hands from picking up my phone and scrolling through my Instagram photos from my high school and uni days. Despite my efforts, I end up comparing myself to when my skin was smooth and my lips were fuller and I didn’t have the same lines around my eyes. I think back to the days when I was pretty, goddamn it. Why have I changed so much?

Here’s the thing, though: that photo with me throwing up peace signs? I wasn’t wearing any makeup that day. I added eyeshadow, lipstick and long lashes via the Airbrush app. And don’t forget the features where I could smooth my skin and enlarge my eyes. In the Krispy Kreme photo, I made my eyes bigger, my nose smaller, my face slimmer and edited out my eyebags and any of what I considered "skin imperfections". In fact, almost every photo I posted of myself between the years of 2016 and 2020 are heavily edited in some way.

As I go through “second puberty” and feel my body and face mature to that of a woman in her late twenties, the temptation to compare myself to the ‘old me’ is becoming harder to resist. This self-flagellation is a feeling I’m sure many women are familiar with, but the dysphoria is particularly crippling because every photograph of myself from this era is a lie. They are genuinely not a reflection of what I look like. These representations of me are not real, and the result is having unrealistic standards of my own face caused by… my own face? And so, in some ways, I have become my own tormenter.

When I was in school, “unrealistic beauty standards” were mostly associated with magazines and digital publications airbrushing their models — crucially, it was a standard others perpetuated, so it really didn’t occur to me that my own use of filters would cause me psychic damage in the future. Now, post-TikTok and in a world where filters are ubiquitous and increasingly hard to spot, we need to be talking about the long term effects of using them — namely, that after a while, you might actually forget what you used to look like.

And if you can’t remember what’s ‘normal’ for your face, accepting it in its current, older form is an uphill battle, made all the harder by this new age of skincare where 10-year-olds are making Drunk Elephant skincare smoothies and cosmetic procedures are no longer a luxury associated with celebrities, but an accessible (and encouraged) way for women of all backgrounds to ‘maintain their youth’.

In fact, warped perceptions of aging are already rife online — just look up any video of a woman aged 27 to 30 years old who isn't wearing makeup. Or, if you want to be particularly upset, look at the comments on this specific video from last year. The comments are tragic, and to me, they’re evidence that we’ve failed our little sisters who have no idea what ‘normal’ aging looks like because they’ve been brainwashed not just by the beauty industry, but by the normalisation of editing your photos, which we were the first generation to do.

The viciousness that is so often spouted by young girls against women they perceive as having aged badly is a result of our own denial that this is an issue with long term consequences — ones that Millennials and older Gen Z women like myself are now reaping.