Why do beauty filters make you look whiter?
This isn't Shirley. But if she were, photography film and filters might be able to capture non-white tones a lot better. (Svetlana Mandrikova/Deposit Photos/)With just one click, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat users can shoot rainbows out of their mouths, sprout furry ears, and even turn back the clock to infanthood. It’s all innocuous fun—until “beauty” filters come into play. Snapchat’s augmented reality filter, for instance, makes users' faces look more elfin by slimming down their noses, coloring their eyes blue or gray, and whitening their skin. Instagram’s Lark and Juno filters work more subtly, overexposing skin tones and blurring them into pale oblivion. Some are calling these editing options the “new bleach.”“Unlike 30 or 40 years ago, these filterings and ‘bleachings’ aren’t done unintentionally,” says Ronald Hall, a professor and skin-color expert at Michigan State University. The distortions are designed to perpetuate a eurocentric standard of beauty, he adds,...