Jessika Power is getting ready to take an Instagram photo for her 380,000 followers. She props up a ring light and fiddles with an app, setting it up to shoot 60 consecutive frames while she poses.
“I will go through 60 photos and choose the best. And it's just like, what a waste of my time ... sometimes you can't really help it,” she tells The Feed.
It’s the trade-off she makes as a social media influencer - a content creator with a medium-to-large following who is sponsored by brands to promote their products and services.
“Having such a large following, people always have something to say. I get constant threats every single day, I get constant insults,” says Jessika.
“Some of the most common questions my followers ask me is always about my cosmetic injections, how many surgeries I've had.”
With her personal “brand” distributed through Instagram, Jessika knows her way around a filter. Some make her lips bigger, others shrink her nose. But she doesn’t use them.
She says filters are the reason why so many are flocking to get the “Instagram Face.”
“I can't sit here and say, 'you should do this and you shouldn't do that.’ But if it makes you feel good, do it, " she said.
“But also just make sure that the standard of beauty you're putting on your Instagram is for yourself and not for everybody else.”
‘They bring in screenshots of influencers and say: 'I want to look like this’'
Dr Ehsan Jadoon, a cosmetic surgeon in Western Australia, has been in the field for almost 15 years.
When he started, patients were in their thirties and forties. Now, the average patient is in their mid or even early twenties – and they’re asking implicitly and explicitly for the “Instagram face”.
Among Dr Jadoon’s common patient requests: plumper lips, sharper noses, pointy chins, sharper jawlines, 'foxy' eyes, porcelain skin and fuller cheekbones.
Dr Ehsan Jadoon says patients coming in for cosmetic work are younger than they used to be.
“And then we spend quite a lot of time trying to educate them that this is not real. This is enhanced. You shouldn't be looking like this.”
To his patients, he encourages just small tweaks or “enhancements”.
“Even though my day-to-day work involves enhancing people's facial and body appearances, I do believe that a point comes when you have to really question as to where should put a stop to this.”
Video calls during the pandemic have made it worse
Dr Gemma Sharp is a senior research fellow studying body image at the Department of Psychiatry at Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne.
She tells The Feed body dysmorphic disorder, an obsessive focus on a real or imagined physical flaw, tends to spring up in early adolescence, the time when young people often join and start using social media apps.
Heightened use of video teleconferencing apps during the pandemic has worsened body image issues.
And the pandemic has made it worse. People are spending a lot more time online and on teleconference platforms, looking at others in the meeting – but also themselves.
“What's happening is that we're scrutinising our own features and zoning in on flaws that we may not have seen before the pandemic."
Norway introduces laws on filtered photos
Last July, Norway brought in a law that banned influencers from posting modified photos without declaring what they've done.
Dr Sharp says even when people are alerted that an image has been edited, it doesn’t tend to reduce body dissatisfaction.
“[It’s] a real shame because I think all of us in the field were hoping that that would be the key, " she said.
“I'm hoping what happens in Norway pushes people to stop posting filtered photos in general, because we are what we consume on social media…we believe that to be the norm.”
Dr Jadoon says he sees it in his patients too.
“The average person doesn't really understand the difference between what is real and what is not real and what is enhanced and what is not enhanced.”
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