21GRAMS New York

Cited by Vanity Fair as an “internet princess” and a “rising culture critic”, 21-year-old Toronto-based culture writer Rayne Fisher-Quann has amassed a cult following across social media. A refreshing voice amongst the consumer, image and self-improvement driven content that reaches young women on TikTok, she’s carved out a niche amongst a new genre of cultural critics. Her work tackles themes relating to the unique experience of being a young woman online, unpacking feminism, digital culture, and capitalism through commentary videos about her writing on these topics. For the 2022 D&AD Annual, Fisher-Quann provides some first-person context to the issue raised by Dove’s multiple Pencil-winning The Reverse Selfie: that filters and the performance of beauty online have deeply affected girls whose self has been shaped by their use during their formative years.

I can’t remember what I looked like as a teenager. It’s strange, being part of the generation with the most prodigious digital footprint in human history and still being unable to piece together a version of my adolescent face that makes sense. I have pictures – maybe too many pictures – but they’re all on social media, and any picture I posted publicly had been run through enough filtering and photoshopping apps to build a new self from scratch. None of them are quite right; in each of them, I’m smoothed, pinched, moulded like clay. My eyes are a little too big, pupils slightly misshapen, buckled under the weight of the pixels shifting around them. My teeth are too white.

I’m certain that I remember having a persistent patch of acne on my chin that showed up when I hit puberty and stuck around for almost a decade, red and painful and reliable as the sunset. If I squint at my face in the mirror, I can still see the places where the skin is scarred dark from years of picking and prodding. I have to work to remember it, though, because any evidence of its existence has been wiped from the historical record – edited out, drawn over, replaced with the smooth, unbroken skin of the prettier, cleaner, more beautiful girl I desperately wanted to be. In those photos, my waist is smaller than I remember it being. My cheeks are slimmer and tighter than they are now, despite the fact that I’ve lost some baby fat. I don’t want to look at photos of that girl anymore; I don’t know who she is, but I can’t seem to escape her.

The actual memories I have of looking at my face and body aren’t accurate, either – they’re marred by self-hatred and dysmorphia, twisted into an equally unrecognisable caricature. I couldn’t look in the mirror without comparing myself to a better version I’d conjured in my head. No matter where I turn, now, I’m looking at a funhouse mirror version of my younger self. This removal from the reality of my own face and body is somewhere between self-inflicted gaslighting and perpetual alienation from the one thing that should have been mine entirely.

It’s not just me, either: thanks to targeted advertising, increasingly suffocating beauty standards and the never-ending ubiquity of social media performance, girls are getting hooked on editing apps younger and younger. Dove’s Reverse Selfie campaign sheds light on the subject by recreating the editing routine that millions of girls perform on every selfie in the never-ending search for perfection.

Social media effectively democratised the act of performing for an audience. Prior to the 2000s, the feeling of celebrity was reserved only for a select few; only the rich and famous had to deal with the exacting scrutiny, constant performance, claustrophobic standards of beauty, and the construction of a personal brand. Now, those expectations are dropped into the lap of every pre-teen with an internet connection. It’s a generation of micro-celebrities; each receiving few of the benefits and all of the drawbacks of mass perception, all told that strategically optimising their public-facing image is the quickest path to happiness and health.

The debate around photoshop was simpler in the past, too. Before social media, photo-editing was something that seemed to be inflicted upon women by faceless patriarchal forces like makeup companies and media conglomerates. Now, girls themselves are consciously editing themselves in service of specific goals; they’re acting as both distributor and receptor of an inconquerable perfection all at once, and it would be both patronising and untrue to act as though they’re not aware enough to hold a degree of autonomy in their decisions. I was a proud and outspoken feminist as a teenager – I, like many young women, had simply arrived at the conclusion that public-facing beauty was a vehicle for power and social survival in a violently misogynistic world. Paradoxically, the pursuit of physical beauty at any cost has been marketed as a natural part of a progressive, ambitious 21st-century woman’s lifestyle: In today’s attention economy, many young women are photoshopping their way into brand deals, job offers and bonafide fame. The debate around photo-editing can no longer simply be about whether it’s right or wrong; we have to consider, too, the forces that are making young women feel like it’s necessary, and how we can destroy those forces at the root.

The girls in Dove’s campaign are all very different, but the glossy end result of their digital makeovers all look eerily similar: bigger eyes, tiny chin, smoothed pores, plump, pouty lips. No matter what you look like, the amorphous pan-ethnic facial blueprint these apps advertise is one-size-fits-all. Writer Jia Tolentino famously called this inescapable online visage “Instagram Face”, although she was referring to a Kardashian-esque mask of fillers, Botox, and facial reconstruction; perhaps editing apps have managed to democratise and redistribute the process of facial conformity as well. 

I miss my younger self desperately. I wish I could tell her that no amount of social capital would ever feel more valuable to me now than the memory of the way her cheeks puffed out when she smiled. Young women today are walking thornier ground than ever; it’s up to all of us to provide them with a better path forward.