BY HER own admission, 19-year-old Manilyn Macalos is addicted to Instagram filters. She has road-tested everything, from ones that add a rosy blush to her cheeks and a sea of light brown freckles under her eyes to others that overlay a swarm of butterflies, flapping their wings over her head. There are filters giving her whiskers and ears made of flowers. She has even tested a Flappy Bird-like filter that allows her to control the eponymous character of the popular mobile phone game by nodding her head.
But Macalos’s most prized filters are the 10 she has saved to her phone. “Most of them make your nose look slimmer, and your eyes and lips a little bigger,” she says.
It sounds like innocent play: it can be fun to mess around with digital photos of ourselves and other things using the latest technology. As well as Photoshopping out blemishes, there are mobile apps that tuck in your stomach or accentuate your curves. One of the most popular apps is Facetune, available since 2013 and used by celebrities to make themselves look slimmer.
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Now, however, Instagram filters are no longer about merely prettifying photos to add to your “grid”. The latest tech means that any short-lasting Instagram Stories that use the filters seem to be more likely to go viral and be seen by millions of users. That changes the effect they can have. As they come to be part of the zeitgeist, we need to think – and know – about filters.
The big change started last August, when Instagram’s parent, Facebook, opened up its Spark AR platform to the public so anyone could develop their ideas for augmented reality (AR) filters.
New online communities formed quickly, with developers trading secrets of how to design good filters, says Tama Leaver at Curtin University in Australia, who is co-author of a recent book called . One Facebook group for Spark AR developers has 51,000 members, who post their latest filters. A recent demo shows one that turns your head into an analogue alarm clock, with neon hands pivoting around the end of your nose. Two bells protrude from your head, with a hammer in between: as you shake your head, the alarm clock rings.
“The reaction video lets users project onto fictional characters and become sexier or more aggressive”
Four months after Facebook opened Spark AR – and just in time to provide a welcome Christmas diversion – the first high-quality filters trickled through. One that captured a lot of attention was developed by a Belgian content creator, photographer and video-maker named Arno Partissimo. The “What Disney character are you?” filter projected an image of a mirror above the head of anyone who took a video using it that cycled through Disney characters. Like a slot machine, it stopped on a random character, capturing reactions.
“I started creating filters because I saw the big potential of this new technology,” says Partissimo. He had made about 25 filters before his Disney creation took off. Inspiration came from Facebook quizzes that Partissimo took when he was younger.
He released the filter, and it quickly went viral. Celebrity users including the Beckham family, DJ Diplo and actors Vanessa Hudgens and Zelda Williams tried it out, posting the results to their Instagram Stories. In a rare case of coincidence, Williams’s random character choice stopped on the genie, the character her father, Robin William, played in the film Aladdin.
Joy of reaction
There were a number of reasons behind the filter’s success, says Leaver. “They’re tapping into our fandoms, but they’re also a bit like a slot machine: it’s fun to see what you get.” The way the filter requires you to effectively record a video of your reactions to get the result is also key, because that is inherently more likely to make something go viral than, for example, filling in a Facebook quiz. The instantaneous-reaction video provides part of the joy for a lot of people, says Leaver. For him, it produces an exaggerated network effect in which the value of something increases according to the number of others using it. And it can also tap into our fear of missing out, or FOMO, inciting others to get involved.
Such match-ups with well-known characters allow users to “act out” and project onto other personalities. “If you want to be more aggressive, outspoken, sexual or kinky, you can rely on this self-representation by proxy,” says Katrin Tiidenberg, who researches social media and visual culture at Tallinn University, Estonia, and is author of , a book about the way we represent ourselves online.
“Because there is this idea of interpretative flexibility involved, you can always back away from it and say it’s just a joke. These quizzes serve partially the same purpose,” she says.
Quiz filters like those are just a small proportion of the filters used on Instagram: most are of the type that tuck in cheeks, smooth out skin and remove even more blemishes than Photoshop. Their popularity is probably best captured by Macalos’s use of them to finesse her selfies.
“It’s like getting instant plastic surgery,” she says. “The more I use it, the more I get addicted to it.” Macalos says that using the Photoshop-style benefits of filters makes her feel 10 times better about how she looks, especially the ones that blur the skin.
Like the quiz-type filters, which spread through digital word of mouth and by users watching friends and idols using them, Macalos finds most of her filters by following celebrity stories on Instagram. “I use them especially when they look good with that specific filter,” she says, citing, among others, US celebrity Kylie Jenner using filters on her photos and videos.
“Most filters tuck in cheeks, smooth out skin and remove more blemishes than Photoshop”
Those face-shifting filters allow people to play about with identity, which is important for teenage or pre-teen Instagram users. Effie Le Moignan, a research associate in social computing at Newcastle University, UK, takes a cautious view of their place in an online world. “There are valid concerns where this overlaps with body image, peer pressure and diet culture, but fundamentally Instagram is a context where people are being aesthetically playful,” she says.
Beautifying filters are complex, says Tiidenberg. “They make us feel better about ourselves, and allow us to see ourselves as more similar to the standards of what is considered beautiful at that moment in the culture. But that is also why they’re problematic – in many cases we’ve seen the filter’s index of how beautiful people are is quite racist and problematic.”
As she points out, the filters tend to make skin lighter and eyes larger, promoting the Western ideal of beauty – even though they are used across the world.
That isn’t something that worries Macalos or her friends. “They don’t mind me using them, but they do think I look different and weird,” she says – “but in a good way.”
