People Are Freaking Out Over The Massive Facial Changes Created By The Bold Glamour Filter
By Angela Redding | Los Angeles, CA, | Hollywood Beat magazine | 3/9/2023
Lead Photo: Dove Canada
Tiktok’s Bold Glamour filter is drawing a lot of criticism. Since it was released last month, the filter has reportedly been downloaded more than 16 million times.
Dove, a company that sells personal care products, is fighting the filter and any negative consequences it may have on society as a whole.
As part of its continued commitment to #NoDigitalDistortion, Dove is urging everyone to stand with them.
Dove is calling on its global community to #TurnYourBack to the trending Bold Glamour filter.
Alex Light, content creator and body confidence advocate says,
“The Bold Glamour filter has now been used over 15 million times, and its popularity certainly doesn’t seem to be waning. What might seem like a harmless filter has the potential to cause damage to our mental health and affect our self-esteem.
Filters like this create a brand new and unrealistic comparison that blurs the lines of reality and sets a new standard for how we think we should look. It’s vital that we push back against these increasingly toxic beauty standards and show young girls that it’s OK to be their authentic, beautiful selves.
I’ve worked with Dove for a long time, and I am so proud to work with a brand who not only pledge no digital distortion in their imagery, but continually work to dismantle beauty standards and champion self-esteem in women and girls. I am fully behind their new campaign.”
Experts Explain How The Filter Works
The filter’s versatility is demonstrated by the way it contours the skin, adds smoky eyeshadow, fuller lips, sculpts cheekbones, and slims the nose.
Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said the filter is probably using “generative AI,” a technology that studies zillions of pictures and text samples, often scraped from the web, to create new images or words. (Farid was a member of TikTok’s content advisory council from 2020 to 2022.)
Luke Hurd, who creates Snapchat and Instagram filters, tweeted that the Bold Glamour effect is using machine learning.“They use something called Generative Adversarial Network,” he said. “They take an image of the user and then compare it to a data set of other images and then redraw your face, pixel by pixel, on the output of your camera feed.”
View Hurd’s Twitter post here. This is a great visual explanation of how the filter works.
The filter gives the illusion that users are not good enough as they are. They need to look a certain way to be accepted. It has the potential of creating an artificial version of those who use it.
Not Opposed to All Filters
While Dove does not oppose all filters and thinks that social media filters can be a means of creativity and self-expression, it considers Tiktok’s Bold Glamour filter as substantially distorting reality and reinforcing strict and unreachable beauty standards. According to Dove, 32% of girls feel they can’t achieve the ideals of beauty that social media influencers portray, and 80% report using a filter or retouching tool to alter their appearance by the age of 13.
Because of this, 36% of girls who often alter their images have poorer body esteem than 18% of girls who don’t.
“Academic studies find that the use of filters and selfie editing are associated with low body confidence, mood, and self-esteem,” explains Dr. Phillippa Diedrichs, Research Psychologist at the Centre of Appearance Research at the University of West England and body image expert.
“Research from Dove found that over 1 in three girls with lower body esteem feel they don’t look good enough without photo editing. Moreover, filters have become part of everyday life for 43% of girls, and 67% try to change or hide at least one part of their body before posting a photo of themselves.
This suggests that the cumulative effect of filters and digital distortion over time is creating appearance pressures and low self-worth among girls and young women.”
With campaigns like #SpeakBeautiful, #NoDigitalDistortion, Reverse Selfie, and #DetoxYourFeed, Dove has long advocated for broader conceptions of beauty and worked to make social media a more positive space. The emergence of the new Bold Glamour filter effect is risky and contributes to the negative beauty ideals Dove has been fighting to combat.
What Can You Do?
By sharing a video with the hashtags #TurnYourBack #BoldGlamour #NoDigitalDistortion and #TurnYourBack #BoldGlamour #NoDigitalDistortion, Dove is urging everyone to take action.
Help for Parents and Caregivers
Dove also provides free, academically-validated tools to parents and other adults through the Dove Self-Esteem Project, enabling them to support children in using social media responsibly. The Confidence Kit, which was produced in collaboration with the Centre for Appearance Research, may be downloaded at Dove.com/ca/en/dove-self-esteem-project. It offers advice on how to turn social media into a safe space where children can thrive.
Dove’s Call
Together, let’s stop retouching apps from blurring young people’s confidence and build positive body image on social media. Join us and #TurnYourBack to #BoldGlamour.
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