What ‘Instagram Face’ Teaches Us About God’s Beauty Standards
By Movieguide® Contributor
Are people today embracing the beauty God gave them? Or have social media and impossible beauty standards led us to a place of idolizing how we look rather than embracing who we are?
Evie Magazine posted a reel to Instagram posing this same question. The reel begins with videos of actresses in the ’90s and 2000s, all with very soft, natural makeup and genuine smiles. “Beauty then,” the caption reads.
After that, the reel shows photos of current celebrities, including Kim Kardashian and Megan Fox, with the caption “Beauty now.”
The reel highlights the drastic difference in appearances between the “then” and “now,” with the more recent photos displaying obvious lip filler, Botox and plastic surgery.
People flocked to the comments to share their thoughts on these dramatic differences. “It’s ‘instagram face.’ Everyone looks the same,” one user said about the more recent beauty trends.
Another user chimed in, “I miss when people actually looked like people instead of weird AI renderings.”
It’s not that enhanced appearance is inherently bad or sinful, but the current trend of altering one’s face to achieve an ever-elusive beauty standard highlights a deeper problem. The New Yorker addressed this phenomenon, calling it “the age of Instagram face.”
“Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe,” The New Yorker explained. “But contemporary systems of continual visual self-broadcasting — reality TV, social media — have created new disciplines of continual visual self-improvement. Social media has supercharged the propensity to regard one’s personal identity as a potential source of profit — and, especially for young women, to regard one’s body this way, too.”
The article goes on to explain what the desired “Instagram face” is.
“We’re talking 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,” the author described.
However, in a world that’s so focused on physical appearance and “beauty,” it’s reassuring to remember that the One who created us cares about something much deeper.
“For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart,” God says in 1 Samuel 16:7.
God also reminds us in Proverbs 31:30 that “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”
Outward appearance is fleeting, and, at the end of the day, intense focus on it is idolatry.
Idolatry is defined as, “extreme admiration, love, or reverence for something.”
When we admire those on social media and aspire to change our outward appearance to look like them, we are idolizing appearance over heart. With all of the pressures that society and social media bring, it makes sense why we feel this way, but we need to remember who we are.
God doesn’t care how big your lips are or how smooth your skin is, and when we pass on from this life, those things won’t matter anyway. In a world that focuses on frivolous things, let’s focus on the things that God cares about: not what you look like but the condition of your heart.
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