We weren’t meant to see this many beautiful faces

Ever get the feeling that, when you open your social apps, all the faces staring back at you are, well, gorgeous? Maybe that’s because it’s holiday season, festival season and Love Island season all at once. But even outside of that, our feeds look like a sort of eternal Hot Girl Summer.

It’s now easier than ever to edit our digital avatars. Apps like FaceTune, Snapchat and TikTok offer subtle face tweaks (you know the ones: slim nose with a shiny button tip, subtle blush, pouty lips), meaning you can rework your look with a single swipe. This, of course, is nothing new. Ever since early magazine imagery and the advent of Photoshop, people have worried about what retouching images would do to us as a society. But now, if social media algorithms are aggressively pushing glossy, symmetrical faces to the front of our feeds, is there a danger of digitally overloading our brains with beauty?

The phrase ​“beauty overstimulation” emerged recently courtesy of writer Eleanor Stern, who said on TikTok: ​“Not only are we being exposed to more beautiful faces on a daily basis, but people are making themselves more beautiful than ever”. It clearly struck a chord. ​“My self esteem improves by just going to [the] grocery store and looking at actual people”, one comment reads. Another: ​“I never take my mask off in public spaces honestly, I just don’t want to be seen by anyone anymore.”

In her book Survival of the Prettiest, Harvard scientist Nancy Etcoff notes that we’re always sizing up other people’s looks, and that our ​“beauty detectors” are always pinging. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok famously favour human faces over scenery or food snaps; people are encouraged to post selfies ​“for the algorithm”, and so the frequency at which we’re seeing faces on our feeds is higher than ever.

​“We notice the attractiveness of each face we see as automatically as we register whether or not they look familiar,” Etcoff writes. ​“Beauty detectors scan the environment like [a] radar: we can see a face for a fraction of a second (150 milliseconds in one psychology experiment) and rate its beauty, even give it the same rating we would give it on longer inspection.”

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