Stop filtering your face

I blame snapchat.

For those unfamiliar with the popular app (where have you been?!) Its premise is simple: upload content - be it a video or a picture - and it'll ‘disappear’ in 24 hours. For many this was an opportunity to send your best mate your ugliest gurning face, safe in the knowledge that no one would see it and it would be gone quicker than Britney Spears first marriage. (Remember that?)

For those braver folk it was a chance to send slightly more intimate parts of their body...buut fanny flashing and willy waving aside, times were simple. Inevitably the app grew with its increasing popularity and began to add new features - my favourite and least favourite being the filters.

Even if you're not a Snapchat user you'd be hardpressed to avoid the filters - whether it's a video of your cousin vomitting rainbows or that girl next door using the dog filter in EVERY single selfie, filters are pretty much taking over social media with even Instagram trying to jump on that doggy filtered bandwagon.

Filters are fun. I get it. I DO it. I mean who doesn't want to upload a video with a voice enhancer to make you sound like a chipmunk or apply a filter so you look like a glamorous cat? (Though, where's the glamorous hedgehog filter at Snapchat?)

Within the app it's fine and harmless - however something weird began to happen with the introduction of ‘sexy filters’. Sexy filters basically rid you of anything that makes you unique - freckles and moles are removed as skin is smoothed, noses are thinner and smaller, eyes wider and lips poutier. Sexy filters suck.

Sexy filters especially suck when people use this essentially photoshopped fake version of themselves and share it all over social media - be that a Facebook profile picture or an Instagram photo and friends and family will coo over how beautiful they look.

It's not you. It doesn't look anything like you. Stop taking compliments for a photo that strips you of everything that ever made you YOU. It's a very basic idea of beauty and you're falling for it. You're falling for an unachievable standard that you'll never reach.

You may think it's harmless and I'm moaning for moaning sake and perhaps I am, but I find myself scrolling through instagram on a daily basis and am concerned by how edited and filtered photos are. You don't need to edit your face - just be you.

A couple of years ago I fell foul to this unachievable standard of beauty and began to use an app to change aspects of my face - be that making my eyes bigger and the whites whiter or slimming my face and nose.

“Have you done something to this photo?” my boyfriend asked, referring to a picture I’d recently uploaded.

“....no…”

“Only your eyes look really weird. You look like an alien.”

I looked at the photo. I DID look like an alien. I'd enlarged my eyes so much I put ET to shame and why? My natural eyes weren't particularly small in the first place. (When I was single and online dating a man once wrote to me to tell me my eyes were too big for my head, for crying out loud.)

Ever since then I stopped editing my photos. So what if my cheeks were a bit chubby or my eyes a bit squinty in the sun - I was a human with an arguably normal human face. (and everyone's eyes go squinty in the sun!)

Some may try to argue that I wear make up which isn't being true to my natural face and what am I talking about, the big hypocrite. HOWEVER make up only really enhances what's already there and doesn't give you a new nose or new cheekbones, natch.

So please - have fun with filters. Enjoy the leopard and the flower crown - but don't let it mask your own individuality. Pick a profile picture that's of YOU - not a shit cartoon version of ‘beauty’.

And please don't edit your photos. You really don't need to and it makes the rest of us feel like trolls.

Kidding.

We’re all beautiful in our way - don't let modern society dictate what's beautiful and what's not. Be true to yourself.

I'll get off my soapbox now.

HayleyHeartsxo