The pursuit of the “Instagram face” has transformed cosmetic procedures from a niche celebrity habit into a widespread youth obsession, fundamentally altering how society perceives human imperfection and aging.
Seven years after New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino coined the term to describe a homogenized, filtered aesthetic, she argues that this beauty standard has trickled down to the general population. The result is a surge in plastic surgery among teenagers and young adults chasing an AI-based beauty standard that is increasingly disconnected from human reality.
The Anatomy of the Instagram Face
The aesthetic relies on a specific amalgamation of features: lifted cheeks, plump lips, enlarged eyes, and a heart-shaped chin. Tolentino notes that this look, popularized by figures like Kim Kardashian, Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Emily Ratajkowski, is actually a composite of different ethnicities assembled into one impossible standard.
A celebrity makeup artist explained to Tolentino that the face combines a South Asian influence for the brows and eye shape, an African American influence for the lips, a Caucasian nose, and a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern. However, when AI is prompted to generate a beautiful woman today, it produces an almost exclusively white, thin, and young face with these specific features. This creates a near-total erasure of other forms of beauty and racial preferences built into our systems.
Cosmetic Procedures Hit the Mainstream
What began as niche behavior among the professionally beautiful has trickled down because those faces are visually overrepresented on social media. Today, the Instagram face is accessible everywhere. You can get it at your local strip mall, and people certainly do. On social media, people’s faces have become uncanny, with freezing foreheads and plump lips becoming the new normal. The drive toward optimization that has driven Silicon Valley for 25 years has come to roost in our faces and bodies.
The normalization of these cosmetic procedures has led to an alarming shift in demographics. Plastic surgeons report a significant uptick in patients under 30. Procedures like Botox and fillers, once associated with middle age, are now popular for teenagers. Tolentino points to a 12-year-old who went viral on TikTok for an anti-aging skin routine. Teenagers as young as 18 are debating whether to start Botox, and 20-somethings wonder if they need facelifts because they think they have jowls. The trend has even reached young men and boys, who are engaging in “looksmaxxing” to optimize their appearance.
The Political Mirror: Mar-a-Lago Face
This pursuit of optimized beauty has also infiltrated the highest levels of politics. Tolentino identifies a “Mar-a-Lago face” among the women of the second Trump administration, describing it as a 2016 Kardashian-esque standard heavily layered with makeup.
“It’s what plastic surgery used to be, where it flaunts itself, where it kind of flaunts its lack of relationship to human reality,” she observes. Tolentino finds it ironic that figures opposing gender-affirming medical care proudly display a look that is itself fundamentally gender-affirming. She notes that this mirrors the administration’s political policy, where power is displayed by proudly disconnecting from reality altogether and slashing anything natural to bits to put gold and lipstick on it.
What Happens Next
As AI-generated beauty standards continue to warp reality, the cultural pushback may center on reclaiming the natural human face. Tolentino emphasizes that imperfection is what makes us human, and she hopes to model this for her own daughter by not prioritizing constant beautification. She wants her daughter to see her valorizing the human rather than trying to improve and protect her looks. The challenge ahead will be dismantling a digital ecosystem that constantly tells young people their faces are not good enough. If every face can be optimized, the face itself loses its status as evidence of a life lived. Moving forward, society will need to grapple with the psychological toll of this digital optimization on a generation taught to view their natural features as flaws to be corrected.
— Maya Singh, culture desk, AXO News