Instagram Face: Contour, Filters and the Photographed Face

In December 2019, as the decade ended, Jia Tolentino described in The New Yorker “the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face.” A celebrity makeup artist gave her its name: “It’s Instagram Face, duh.”^[1]

The face was new in only one respect. Shading and lighting a face so that a camera reads its bones differently is an old technique. What the 2010s changed was the camera, which was now in everyone’s hand, and the audience, which was now everyone.

Instagram launched in October 2010, and on it, Tolentino wrote, “the ideal image is always the one that instantly pops on a phone screen.”^[2] In April 2012 Facebook agreed to buy it for approximately $1 billion in cash and shares, calling it a photo-sharing app for mobile devices.^[3] Video moved the same way: by the count of the advertising-technology firm Pixability, views of beauty-related content on YouTube rose from 4 billion in 2010 to 104 billion in 2017.^[4]

For makeup this meant an audience of strangers for every face, and a running measure of how each one performed. Huda Kattan, whose tutorials grew into a cosmetics company, called Instagram “the catalyst that changed everything”.^[4]

The makeup of that face was contour and highlight: a deeper shade beneath the cheekbone and along the jaw, a light one on the high points. None of it was new. In 1967 Gala of London’s Face Shaping series included Velvet Shapers, a pair of light and dark creams applied over foundation to accentuate the contours of the face, with a pearly white highlighter to go with them.^[5] Kevyn Aucoin set out sculpting and contouring for general readers, with the shades named, in 2000.^[6]

The 2010s turned the technique into a category of its own. When Kim Kardashian West started her makeup line in June 2017, its first product was a contour and highlighting kit, in light, medium, dark and deep dark shades, and industry sources expected all 300,000 of them, at $48, to sell out in less than five minutes.^[7] The same year the market-research firm NPD counted bronzers, highlighters and glow products, with foundation and eye shadow, among the drivers of growth in American prestige makeup.^[8]

The photograph could also be adjusted after it was taken. Snapchat, launched in 2011, kept its users in large part with photo filters, some of which showed a face thinner, with smoother skin, larger eyes and fuller lips; FaceTune, released in 2013, allowed more precision still, and Instagram added flattering selfie filters of its own. The retouching that magazines had long done to celebrities could now be done by anyone, in a few taps, to a picture of themselves.^[9]

In October 2019 Instagram announced that it would remove “all effects associated with plastic surgery” from its filters. That appeared, Tolentino noted, to mean only those explicitly named for it; the filters that gave a user Instagram Face would remain.^[9]

The makeup artist’s point was that some of what contour had imitated could now be bought. In 2002 the Food and Drug Administration approved Botox for preventing wrinkles, and a few years later hyaluronic-acid fillers; such procedures lasted six months to a year and cost far less than surgery. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Americans received more than seven million neurotoxin injections and more than two and a half million filler injections in 2018.^[11]

Tolentino found the result on one repeated face, which she called “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic”, and the makeup artist she interviewed read it as features borrowed from many ancestries and assembled on one head.^[11] The decade asked whose skin a foundation was made for. Its feed raised a second question beside it: whose features a face was being assembled from.

“Instagram Face” is a description, not a measurement. The essay that named it was reported among makeup artists and Beverly Hills surgeons, and its most striking figures — that ninety-five per cent of the most-followed people on Instagram use FaceTune, and that as many have had a cosmetic procedure — are one makeup artist’s estimates, offered as such.^[12] How many people wore the full contoured face, or wanted to, is not counted in any source used here.

Nor do the sources here establish who made contouring popular in the 2010s. The technique was in print for general readers by 2000,^[13] and the decade’s sources record contour kits selling fast without saying who taught their buyers to want them. Popular accounts that credit one person with the trend are not supported by anything this archive has been able to read, and this account does not repeat them.