Beauty by Algorithm: From Colonial Taxonomies to Instagram Face
Illustration by Poonam Chauhan https://thekit.ca/beauty/body/dr-6ix-toronto-plastic-surgeon/
My friend recently showed me his favorite article of all time, a publication from The New Yorker titled, “The Age of Instagram Face: How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look.”
In it, author Jia Tolentino describes a peculiar phenomenon I had noticed but never quite articulated—that social media has manufactured a specific, homogenized beauty standard she calls “Instagram Face”: plump lips, high cheekbones, cat eyes, a small nose, and poreless, glowing skin. The look is eerily uniform yet ethnically ambiguous, featuring “an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.”
Source: National Geographic https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/visualizing-change
Reading this article, I couldn't help but draw parallels to what I learned from a course on the cultural history of reproduction from antiquity to the enlightenment. Today's beauty industrial complex—filters, fillers, and constant self-surveillance—echoes a disturbing historical pattern where bodies become sites of classification, modification, and control.
The construction of racial and national identities during the Enlightenment wasn't merely philosophical—it was anatomical. Racial and national identities were deeply intertwined with emerging scientific knowledge about human reproduction.
Enlightenment, male thinkers and naturalists sought to categorize and hierarchize the perceived differences between racial groups based on their reproductive anatomies and birthing experiences. However, they did so within a framework that increasingly excluded women from the scientific discourse. A heightened awareness of identities and differences fueled a desire to reinforce existing social orders to justify colonial exploitation, which played a foundational role in the construction of racial and national differences. Natural philosophers like Charles White categorized humans based on skull shapes, brain sizes, genital measurements, and birthing experiences. European anatomy became the standard; all others were “deviations.”
Scientific discourse twisted itself into contradictions to maintain white supremacy. Large hips in European women indicated superior femininity, yet in African women, the focus shifted to their supposedly smaller skulls and "primitive" nature. Black women's bodies became subjects of voyeuristic examination—their physical characteristics scrutinized in scientific literature that read more like colonial fantasy than objective study.
Today's Instagram Face represents a new chapter in this troubling narrative. The algorithm has become our modern naturalist, flattening diverse beauty into a homogenized ideal that appropriates features across racial lines while still centering whiteness.
The plastic surgeon in Tolentino's article celebrates that "people are absolutely getting prettier" through these interventions, echoing the 19th-century belief that conformity to European standards represented an "improvement." The language has shifted from biological racism to aesthetic preference, but the hierarchy remains.
What has changed is the illusion of choice. Unlike the rigid racial categories of colonial science, Instagram Face presents itself as available to anyone—if you're willing to pay for it, filter it, or surgically achieve it. The democratic façade masks its fundamentally undemocratic nature: a beauty standard requiring constant painful modification is neither free nor liberating.
Both eras weaponized visibility. Colonial scientists subjected Black women's bodies to public exhibition and scrutiny. Today, we've internalized this gaze. Our phones have become portable mirrors, turning us into both the observed and the observer.
The constant self-surveillance enabled by our mobile cameras has transformed our relationship with appearance in ways that echo the clinical gaze of those 18th-century anatomists. The difference? We now volunteer for this scrutiny and fund the institutions that profit from our insecurities.
What would it mean to truly decolonize beauty? Perhaps it begins with recognizing how “objective” standards, whether scientific or algorithmic, have always served to reinforce existing power structures.
The Instagram Face phenomenon isn't merely about vanity or technology. It's the latest chapter in a centuries-long project where bodies are measured against artificial standards created by those with the power to define "normal" and "beautiful."
As we toggle between filters and reality, remember that beauty standards have never been neutral. They've always been political, always about power. The scientific racism of yesterday and the algorithmic beauty of today share this uncomfortable truth: both claim objectivity while enforcing conformity.
Perhaps true liberation starts with putting down the mirror—or at least recognizing who taught us how to look into it in the first place.
Bibliography
Cody, Lisa Forman. Birthing the nation: Sex, science, and the conception of eighteenth-century Britons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Schiebinger, Londa L. Nature’s body: Gender in the making of modern science. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Tolentino, Jia. "The Age of Instagram Face." The New Yorker, December 12, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/decade-in-review/the-age-of-instagram-face.