The Digi-Beauty Standard
By Elizabeth Jung
The performance of beauty on social media isn’t a new phenomenon. Scene queens of ye olde Myspace era paved the way for e-girls of the Instagram generation to flourish. However, now that being plugged in is easier than ever with the proliferation of smartphones and new apps, e-girls are achieving a kind of popularity in mainstream culture that previous generations of extreme beauty queens would have never imagined. I suppose “e-girl” has a loose definition, but if I had to stick a picture next to a dictionary entry it would be of a girl with impossibly smooth skin, impossibly large eyes & lips, an impossibly tiny nose, and uncanny valley make-up which always seems to lean a little too “hot fish girl from Shark Tales.” Everything is sharp and perfected; from a striking contour, to a ‘nipped-and-tucked-esque’ body, thus demonstrating the potential to contort and re-work the human form. I’m sure you all conjured an image in your mind, but if that’s still not clear enough consider: Kardashian-ified. An impossible fantasy become pixelated ‘reality’.
It’s not enough anymore to be a self-taught, pseudo makeup artist and guru of fashion trends. Oh no, the landscape of the instagram e-girl requires knowledge in Photoshop, branding, and marketing of the self. Good news though, if you’re Photoshop deficient there are a plethora of apps to help bridge that gap (facetune, anyone?)!!
Every bit of yourself can be reconstructed, reconfigured, redefined. Blurring the boundaries between the digital/physical realm is the emergence of augmented reality filters. What started out as cute, cartoon dog ears via Snapchat filters has now been pushed to the limit with artist’s crafting their own sleek, Cyborgian filters available for universal use in the Instagram ‘Effect Gallery.’ As the popularity of these image altering devices continues to grow it could be argued that augmented reality has the potential to become our legitimate reality. Now, let’s consider it’s 2029 ~ without all the doom and gloom. Technology has continued to flourish without the threat of digital apocalypse. We have embraced a fuller online life. Something like Instagram probably still exists, but in efforts to ‘expand the platform,’ ‘bring individuals together,’ and ‘encourage connectivity,’ there is new digital scanning technology, where your very essence can be recreated pixel by pixel to exist amongst other masses of pixels.
We’ve managed to circle back to the dawn of social media and returned to the type of Avatarification seen on platforms like SecondLife, or IMVU. You are no longer constrained to your physical self: you have the ability to (re)present your livelihood with the tap of a button or swipe of a screen. It is in this context that the e-girls are the pioneers: they have asserted their presentation of self, embraced technology to become something beyond human, akin to the liberated cyborg champions conceptualized by Donna Haraway. May we all learn to embrace the breakdown between organism and machine as graciously as the 2019 e-girl have.
