After a few months of shivering through Severance’s blank white corridors and icy exterior shots, I’ve appreciated the sultry visual texture of The White Lotus’s third season: the vivid prints of high-end resort wear; the ominous blue of the ocean; the verdant setting (as wild and seething as anything manicured into luxury-hotel perfection can be). The show is thrilling as a sensory experience, humming with sinister percussive beats and the occasional muffled animal squawk in the distance. Against this backdrop, it feels only natural that we’d fall in love with the characters who seem the most real, the most alive.
I’m talking, of course, about Chelsea, played by Aimee Lou Wood, and Chloe, played by Charlotte Le Bon—two gorgeous women who meet at a bar after Chelsea says, “I love your outfit,” and Chloe replies, “Thank you! I love your teeth.” This quick moment set off a good-natured riot of online debate—labeled the “smile discourse” by Allure—about what it means to see not just imperfect teeth on-screen, but also imperfect teeth on women who are undeniable knockouts. I’ll defer to others regarding the particulars of dental trends, but I can tell you how it made me feel to see such gloriously irregular beauty amid all the identical Instagram faces with the same Tic-Tac veneers, stenciled eyebrows, and contoured cheekbones: relieved.
Lately, I’ve been finding myself more and more unsettled by digital faces tweaked and pixelated into odd perfection and real bodies buffed and whittled down into obscene angularity—women who look less like flesh-and-blood beings than porcelain ornaments. At the Oscars last month, Rachel Tashjian wrote in The Washington Post, the eerie flawlessness of so many red-carpet looks seemed to encapsulate “how weight loss drugs and technology, including photo editing and AI-generated imagery, have ushered in an outrageous drive for perfection that has overtaken Hollywood.” If you compare the poreless, rose-toned face of the superstar Ariana Grande with the sculpted cheekbones and button nose of the Spanish influencer Aitana Lopez, it’s hard to discern even infinitesimally minute flaws in either. Unlike Grande, though, Lopez is computer-generated—one of a new breed of models with hundreds of thousands of followers and horny men continually sliding into her DMs, despite the fact that she’s wholly nonexistent.
Much has been written over the past few months about the propagandist tendencies of artificially generated art—the way it’s been gleefully adopted by right-wing trolls to create photorealistic but recognizably fake images of Elon Musk giving out wads of cash, or the surreal 30-second clip that Donald Trump recently posted imagining Gaza as a gilded beachside temple to wealth and potentates. These kinds of pictures are intended to provoke—to catch the eye with their mawkish absurdity and uncanny-valley optics. But to me at least, the beautified AI faces are no less offensive. They reflect back at us toxic values that we’re in thrall to, and capture none of the qualities we should truly appreciate. The writer Daphne Merkin once observed that in reality, we find imperfection enchanting because we recognize “that behind the visceral image lies an internal life.” Which, I’d wager, is why the wonky smiles of Wood and Le Bon are so compelling in this moment: They assert the intangible beauty of having a soul.
We have never, as mere human bags of flesh and bone, been so perfectible. We’ve never had as many tools in our arsenal with which to maximize our superficial value: weight-loss drugs that can make slim bodies even smaller, Botox and fillers that smooth out wrinkles, contouring pens that define features. This is even before we get into the realm of augmented reality. On TikTok, I can broadcast myself using a filter that makes me look exactly as I did at 23: lifted, smoothed, softer, and also somehow lighter and less harried. Ninety percent of British women and nonbinary people polled in 2020 confessed to sometimes using filters before posting selfies, and 85 percent to using external editing software such as FaceTune to tweak pictures of themselves. Every single woman surveyed said they had been served videos promoting plastic surgery in their feeds: before-and-after reels selling lip fillers, teeth-whitening treatments, butt enhancers. A few months ago, I too was suddenly inundated with clips of scrub-wearing surgeons “analyzing” Lindsay Lohan’s face, after new images of the actor suddenly began to circulate revealing catlike eyes, a heart-shaped face, and the skin of a well-rested teenager.
What struck me about the Lohan images was less what work she had or hadn’t done, and more the way in which, virtually overnight, a battalion of influencer-doctors jumped onto social media, selling us on the idea of our own transformation. To some extent, each generation has lived through its own freakout regarding what technological advances might be doing to beauty standards, and to our fragile sense of self. In 2006, The Guardian noted that Photoshop was making even supermodels outraged, and that tabloids were reacting to the prevalence of perfected images by seeking out unflattering candid shots for balance: stars with straggly hair, or visible cellulite, or slight paunches. In 2019, the cultural critic Jia Tolentino coined the term Instagram Face for the “single, cyborgian look” being popularized on social media by models and influencers. And in her new book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, the journalist Vauhini Vara writes about how technology has managed to change the way human beings look by altering our ideals, giving us a funhouse-mirror reflection of how we think we should look. “To live like this, endlessly comparing our imperfect fleshy selves with the sanitized digital simulacra of selfhood that appears online and finding ourselves wanting,” Vara notes, “exerts such a subtle psychic violence that we might not even be aware of it as it’s happening.”
In some ways, though, technology also primed us for what was to come. The more fault we’re compelled to find with our own unsymmetrical, lined, irredeemably lived-in faces, the more we’re set up to be swayed by the unreal smoothness of AI imagery. In 2023, when the AI image generator Stable Diffusion XL was launched, the company behind it boasted that the product created the most photorealistic images yet available. (It offered, by way of emphasis, a picture of a panda in a spacesuit sitting at a bar.) What was clear early on, though, was that Stable Diffusion XL had the same biases and prejudices humans do, amplified to an absurd extent. Prompts for “a person at social services” generated pictures of predominantly Black women; prompts for “a productive person” generated largely white men in suits. AI image generators also had, as my former colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce reported, a “hotness problem,” generating pictures of people who were all improbably attractive. Possibly this is because they were built by scanning edited and airbrushed photos—not just of professionally attractive people, but of us. (Every time you FaceTune a selfie, the theory goes, a neural network further distorts its sense of what humans actually look like.)
Recently, I asked Microsoft’s Image Creator for a picture of a normal woman. It gave me four extraordinarily beautiful women with curly hair, sculpted jawlines, and plump lips. (All four were wearing glasses, a supposed de-beautifying trick that didn’t work in She’s All That and doesn’t work now.) Then I asked for a picture of an average woman, for which I received four images of radiantly smiling women in baggy sweaters with slightly frizzy hair. Finally, prompted to give me a picture of an average 42-year-old woman (my birthday is this month), the program gave me the eeriest images of all: four Anne Hathaway look-alikes with monstrously oversize grins and visible clavicles, betraying only slight lines around their eyes, and inexplicably surrounded by other grinning hot people, as if advertising a cult.
What’s so unsettling about these images, I think, is how they reflect what we’re allowing technology to do to us, what it’s already done. Given the ability to amend our own faces, we’ve helped normalize and propagate a horribly restrictive vision of beauty and humankind, and the more we distort ourselves in turn, the more confining the ideal becomes. Recently, the art historian Sonja Drimmer argued that artificial intelligence was “essentially useless” for the purpose of studying history, because historians “look for untold stories” and “elements of the history of mankind that are novel and unexpected.” Programs such as ChatGPT, by contrast, can only skim and interpret texts and images that already exist, extrapolating them into likely outcomes. If you’re looking for nuance, or uncertainty, or subtext, it can’t help you.
With regards to beauty, I’d bargain that everyone knows someone who shouldn’t, by all superficial accounts, be attractive, and yet they are. Because: We’re better than computers at reading between the lines and can see other people’s faces not just as structural compositions of bone and skin, but also as reflections of personality, of humanity, of depth. And the more we can defend beauty as nonconformist, as the essence of something internal and unmeasurable, the more we protect ourselves from the narrowing grip of techno-homogenization. In The White Lotus, and in reality, Wood’s face isn’t just beautiful. It’s guileless, openhearted, kind, tender. “You’re never going to look like what you think perfect is,” the actor told Glamour. And the more I see perfect, the less I can bear it.
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