The Instagram Face and the Pressure to Optimize Women

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In my previous post, I discussed the looksmaxxing lexicon. A similar vocabulary surrounds the idea of the “Instagram face,” a term Jia Tolentino coined in The New Yorker to describe a beauty ideal popular among women. Tolentino recently revisited the subject on NPR’s Fresh Air with host Tonya Mosley, which seemed like a fitting follow-up to the looksmaxxing discussion.

The interview followed her New Yorker essay “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare,” which argues that cosmetic work is becoming harder to detect even as it becomes more extreme. A companion column by Joshua Rothman approaches the same issue from another perspective: what it might take to fight appearance-based discrimination.

Beauty Ideals

  • How “Instagram face” got its name. In her 2019 eassay, Tolentino described a single face emerging among professionally beautiful women: poreless skin, high cheekbones, catlike eyes, a small neat nose, and full lips. She called it distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic, a composite suggesting the shared descendants of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner. Celebrity makeup artist Colby Smith coined the term, telling her it was “Instagram face” and comparing it to a sculpture made of clay.
  • A face made from borrowed features. Smith broke the look down by origin: South Asian brows and eye shape, an African American influence in the lips, a Caucasian nose, and cheek structure drawing on Native American and Middle Eastern features. Tolentino’s concern was that an algorithmic tendency to turn everything into a greatest-hits composite had created an ideal that favored white women who could manufacture a look of rootless exoticism.
  • The tools that made the look easier to achieve. Instagram launched in 2010, Snapchat’s filters followed in 2011, and FaceTune arrived in 2013, making it easy to see a slightly improved version of your own face. Botox had already been approved for wrinkles in 2002, with hyaluronic-acid fillers following soon after, turning cosmetic work into something that could be done over a lunch break. By 2018, Tolentino reported, Americans received more than seven million neurotoxin injections and spent $16.5 billion on cosmetic surgery, with 92 percent of procedures performed on women. Smith estimated that most of Instagram’s most-followed users both edit their photos and have had work done.
  • How the edited face became the real face. Tolentino describes a simple cycle: women edit their photographs, broadcast the edited version, then use procedures to make their real faces match. She saw the process firsthand at a Beverly Hills consultation, where a surgeon photographed her, opened FaceTune to reshape her chin and cheeks, and then quoted the injectables needed to reproduce the changes. Smith described Kardashian West as “patient zero” for the look.
  • How the look spread beyond celebrities. What began among the wealthy and professionally beautiful spread because those faces were so heavily represented on screens. Tolentino told Mosley that social-media faces have become uncanny, with frozen foreheads and plumped lips, and that the look is now available almost anywhere in the United States.
  • When surgery became harder to see. Instagram face grew out of injectables and was often visibly artificial. Newer facelifts are the reverse: hours of surgery beneath the skin producing results subtle enough to look natural. Tolentino cites a report of nine procedures performed on a 65-year-old woman during a single six-hour session. She describes the most expensive work today as seamless and faintly secretive.
  • Why younger people are getting procedures. Tolentino reports that a survey from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery projected a 19 percent rise in facial procedures, with 57 percent of surgeons reporting more patients under 30. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons counted nearly 50,000 Botox and filler procedures for patients under 20 in 2024. A 14-year-old also went viral on TikTok for an anti-aging routine she had followed since age 12.
  • When being open about surgery can encourage more of it. Vogue called 2025 the year of plastic-surgery transparency, and celebrities now answer speculation with specifics. Tolentino is skeptical of the logic. Openness is supposed to ease unrealistic standards while also making surgery feel more accessible. In that cycle, more disclosure can lead to more procedures, justified by insecurities the procedures helped create.
  • The look Tolentino calls “Mar-a-Lago face.” Tolentino uses the term for the exaggerated look common among women of the second Trump administration, describing it as the Kardashian standard of 2016 arriving at the seat of power with considerably more makeup. Unlike newer surgery, it advertises its distance from the natural. She also points to the tension between a political movement hostile to gender-affirming care and an aesthetic that is, in her words, fundamentally gender-affirming.
  • How looksmaxxing reflects the same obsession. Male beauty standards have climbed sharply, Tolentino argues, as women gained platforms to appraise men the way men long appraised women. Some men responded by taking that same appearance obsession and rebranding it. She notes the movement’s eugenicist frame, its habit of calling women “foids,” and its double standard of admiring men for beauty work while condemning women for it.
  • How AI is reproducing the same beauty ideal. When Washington Post reporters asked three AI tools to generate images of an ordinary woman in 2024, nearly all were thin and light-skinned. When asked for a beautiful woman, almost none showed any sign of age. Tolentino notes that these systems train partly on pornography, while the fantasy women circulating online, including those Elon Musk posts from his own tool, tend to wear variations of Instagram face.
  • What happened to the old media debate. Tolentino traces a line from Jezebel’s campaigns against retouched magazine covers through a wave of pop feminism that at least debated whether self-display counted as empowerment. Those sites have largely closed, and many of the magazines they criticized have folded. In their place are influencer feeds circulating the same imagery without much of the argument.
  • Why we rarely talk about appearance-based discrimination. Rothman reports that the research on lookism is clear: attractive people find it easier to earn money, find partners, and even prevail in court, while unattractive people are judged more harshly and rated as lower performers. Economist Daniel Hamermesh has estimated the lifetime beauty premium at roughly $140,000. Yet, as Rothman notes, there is no advocacy group for unattractive people and little workplace training on the subject. Drawing on philosopher Thomas Spiegel, he suggests that being identified as unattractive carries a particular discomfort that other forms of bias may not.
  • What resisting lookism might look like. Rothman considers several possibilities. Legal scholars have proposed adding appearance to anti-discrimination law, though attractiveness falls along a spectrum rather than into clear categories, and blind hiring has produced mixed results. He is more drawn to Ted Chiang’s story about a procedure that switches off the perception of beauty and to writer Stephanie Fairyington, whose book about her own sense of ugliness offers a plainer answer: resist lookism by insisting on human multidimensionality. Prejudice works, after all, by flattening people.

Tolentino’s two essays, written seven years apart, suggest that the real transformation lies not in the ideal itself, but in how accessible it has become. A look once reserved for the professionally beautiful can now be bought in most American towns, sought out by teenagers, and reproduced at scale by machines trained on the women who embraced it first. Rothman’s column adds another layer, showing why resisting lookism is so difficult: even when its harms are well documented, naming them can still feel uncomfortable.

What emerges from both pieces is less a judgment about individual choices than an opportunity to examine the broader systems that shape them. Tolentino and Rothman approach the subject with curiosity rather than moralizing, keeping the focus on the social and cultural forces surrounding appearance. This perspective shifts the discussion away from whether people should or should not alter their appearance and toward a closer examination of why these choices have become so widespread. In the end, Tolentino’s observation to Mosley points to a simple possibility: imperfection might just be our greatest asset.

Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my AI exploration process. For more information, check out the original articles listed below.

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