It’s no secret that many of us present our best selves on social media. We use social media sites like Instagram to share moments from our lives where we feel and look our finest. But occasionally, the content we publish doesn’t accurately reflect who we are.
It can be challenging to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent information on social media. We may entirely alter and reconstruct ourselves into someone we are not using editing programs like Facetune and Photoshop. We have the ability to transform our bodies and faces into something that is totally unidentifiable with just a few taps. We may eventually lose sight of our true appearance.
As a society, we try to encourage confidence and body positivity. Why do so many of us fall into the harmful trap of beauty editing applications if this is something that is so essential to us?
What happens when you glance up from the photo and realize that this is not who you really are? Slimming down your waist, making your lips appear bigger, erasing the blemishes on your skin, and whitening your teeth for your Instagram images could offer you a tiny confidence boost for a moment.
Social media can be harmful. We’ve ingrained the notion that we must appear perfect in pictures we upload. But in reality, nobody is perfect, and we all have weaknesses and insecurities. So many individuals are unkind to themselves when it comes to their appearance and body.
The act of “fixing this” and “changing that” in our photos results in a misleading perception of who we are and how we appear, which can be perplexing to our thoughts and detrimental to our self-esteem. It can become so edited that we are unable to distinguish between the real and the fake, which is harmful to our mental health.
Our ability to entirely alter our body type and facial traits is made possible through editing apps. By doing this, we are developing an unhealthy attachment with our appearance by contrasting our real self with an idealized version we have built on our phones. We are setting a bar for our own definition of beauty that is unattainable.
Also see: How sleeping with make-up damages your skin
