The Age of Instagram Face

by Jia Tolentino

Intermediate · Medium

Original on newyorker.com
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Summary

Tolentino traces the rise of a homogeneous, filter-ready face seen across celebrities and influencers in the 2010s. She interviews a makeup artist and plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills, sits for consultations herself, and connects the trend to editing apps, injectable fillers, and a culture that treats the body as an asset to optimize. She ends unsettled by how the experience changed her view of her own face.

Key points

  • A single, ethnically ambiguous beauty ideal has spread among famous women on Instagram.
  • Apps like FaceTune and Snapchat filters let users preview an edited version of their own face.
  • Botox and fillers made cosmetic changes cheaper, temporary, and popular with younger women.
  • Surgeons now market openly on Instagram, and celebrity clients promote them.
  • Social media encourages people, especially young women, to treat their bodies like businesses to improve.
  • Posing as a patient left Tolentino with an anxious feeling she associated with adolescence.

Why practice this

Tolentino blends reported scenes, wry description, and cultural criticism in long, precise sentences that turn on a sharp final clause. Retyping her teaches how to move between first-person experience and argument while keeping a cool, observant tone.

Practice an excerpt

These excerpts are short quotations for practice and commentary. All rights stay with the author; read the whole essay at the original source.

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Instagram, which launched as the decade was just beginning, in October, 2010, has its own aesthetic language: the ideal image is always the one that instantly pops on a phone screen. The aesthetic is also marked by a familiar human aspiration, previously best documented in wedding photography, toward a generic sameness.
For those born with assets—natural assets, capital assets, or both—it can seem sensible, even automatic, to think of your body the way that a McKinsey consultant would think about a corporation: identify underperforming sectors and remake them, discard whatever doesn’t increase profits and reorient the business toward whatever does.
They looked beautiful. The sun went down, and the hills of L.A. started to glitter. I had the sense that I was living in some inexorable future. For some days afterward, I noticed that I was avoiding looking too closely at my face.

About this essay

Tolentino investigates how social media, photo filters, and cheap cosmetic procedures have produced a single, uniform beauty ideal.

“The Age of Instagram Face” was written by Jia Tolentino. Read the original at newyorker.com. Copywork shows a summary and short excerpts for practice and commentary; all rights stay with the author.

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