Seven Billion People, One Face: The Rise of ‘Instagram Face’ and the Colonisation of Beauty

By Catherine Mullner

It’s like watching a horror movie. 

You’re sitting there with a smug look on your face, yelling at the screen as the girl cluelessly walks around her home, the killer stalking after her. “How can she not see? How could she be so stupid!” The killer has always been there in plain sight, and you are sure that you would always see them – you would be smart enough to see them. 

But, in reality, sometimes you don’t see the danger until it is too late. This is how I felt when I realised what the trend of ‘Instagram Face’ was and how prevalent it had become. I am scrolling through Instagram and realise, in what feels like a Twilight Zone-esque fever dream, that I’ve seen the same face at least ten times in my feed. 

Maybe ‘Instagram Face’ isn’t the boogeyman running behind every one of us in our own lives, but there is still something eerie and harmful occurring within this trend. Where did it originate from, and how is it affecting the standardisation and commodification of beauty online?

One Face Fits All? 

In a 2018 BBC article titled, 'I Tried 'Instagram Face' for a Week and Here’s What Happened...' Alexandra Jones documented her experience trying ‘Instagram Face’ makeup. With “photo-perfect skin and sculpted, contoured cheekbones, wide almond-shaped eyes that taper up into a feline point, and that full, inescapable mouth”, Jones set out on the streets of London. 

Throughout the week, Jones experienced a myriad of emotions: the high of gaining followers and likes online due to her new look, the pain of waking up at 6 am before work to fit in her new makeup routine, and the annoyance of trying to maintain her look throughout the day while dealing with increased harassment from strangers. 

‘Instagram Face’, Jones explains, is “very homogenised, you’re re-drawing a person’s individual features to fit a narrow mould.” ‘Instagram Face’ is seen as trying to achieve absolute perfection of one’s facial appearance. It means walking around trying to keep a programmed face filter on every single moment of the day, projecting the male fantasy of what a woman should look like. There is, however, a key element missing from Jones’ article: ‘Instagram Face’, for all its seeming frivolity, is the physical and mental colonisation of facial features, specifically of Black and Asian women. 

Modern Robbery 

Let’s return to Jones’ description of what ‘Instagram Face’ consists of: glass skin, high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes that taper up to a feline point, and full lips. We can go through this checklist and pick out the aspects of ‘Instagram Face’ that are being directly appropriated from peoples who have historically been subjugated by colonial forces and made to feel that their features are inferior. 

Jones’ article was written right before the phenomenon of the ‘fox eye’ trend became viral in early 2020, during which big celebrities like Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner used eyeshadow and eyeliner to specifically change the shape of their eye to one that is narrow, elongated, and upturned, or ‘almond’. This exact feature can be seen in the original ‘Instagram Face’ of 2017-2018, and has now been taken to the extreme in 2020 onwards. 

In an article for The Tab, Vivian Iroanya discussed the racist connotation of the ‘fox eye’ trend with several East Asian women across the UK. It is one thing to have that eye shape naturally and not be of Asian heritage, it is another to see incredibly powerful influences flaunt this new eye shape and then pull their hands back on either side of their face, reminiscent of the ways in which white people often make fun of East Asian people’s eye shape.

Natalie Cheung of the Yellow Bee Pod Podcast articulated the issue most poignantly: “individuals with this elongated eye shape can’t just change their appearance when this ‘trend’ is over”. This language is perhaps the most striking because it is so familiar to exact conversations that are being had about blackfishing in social media right now, in particular the blackfishing that is designed into ‘Instagram Face’.

In a 2018 Vice UK article titled ‘White Girls Reinventing Themselves as Black Women on Instagram has to Stop’, Emma Dabiri discussed the blackfishing occurring widely across social media and how this has affected her as a mixed-race woman. If we’re moving down the checklist of demanded features to achieve ‘Instagram Face’, several are features appropriated directly from Black women. High cheekbones, full lips, and wide eyes are all features that have ruthlessly been caricatured of Black people in media throughout the 19th to, well, the early 21st century. Dabiri points out that ultimately, this pattern hasn’t ended; rather, just like the boogeyman, it simply takes on different forms. She explains: “white chicks’ profitability seems to soar if they can flirt with the suggestion of blackness, without being burdened by the reality of actually being black”. Huge celebrities like Ariana Grande and Rita Ora all have done this, and although they may get called out on it, their net worth still grows every year.

Instagram and the Streamlining of Appropriation 

The most horrifying part of this appropriation is in the rapid commodification and standardisation that is made possible by platforms like Instagram. #KylieJenner has over 20,000,000 posts on Instagram, and the #KylieJennerchallenge has over 117,000 posts. It has never been easier to appropriate people’s features, hair, or bodies: there are hundreds of tutorials to show you how to get ‘Instagram Face’, the ‘fox eye’, and more. Products, such as Kylie Jenner’s famous Lip Kits, are made available to fill the demand created by her own popularisation of ‘Instagram Face’. 

If you don’t want to spend time applying the ‘Instagram Face’ makeup, there are now ‘Kylie Jenner Filler Packages’ widely available at any cosmetic surgeon in the area. In an article published in September of last year on Vice UK titled, “The Unstoppable Rise of ‘Instagram Face’”, Sirin Kale explored the ways that the plastic surgery industry is meeting the demand of those who want to keep this face semi-permanently. 

Without the burden of racial discrimination, and in the knowledge that they can shift and reconfigure the notion of beauty in a way that women of colour are less able to, many women can get non-invasive surgical procedures at a semi-reasonable cost and achieve the new look with seemingly little risk, and high reward. Yet, what perhaps illustrates the relationship between this new trend and the appropriation it depends on is the fact that the women who take on this ‘Instagram Face’ are mainly called out for being promiscuous and ‘slutty’, rather than racist. People focus on women trying to play out a male-owned fantasy, occupying the exotic and the non-dangerous, the sultry and the inviting, and the racism and fetishisation this fantasy is built on are swept under the rug. 

The women who can remove their ‘Instagram Face’ when this trend inevitably changes can easily slip back into their own lives and live in their own skin comfortably. However, the women whose features were stolen will still live the negative consequences of this commodification and will still be hyper-sexualised, harassed, and demeaned. 

Concluding Thoughts on an Unsolved Issue 

We have unmasked the boogeyman, but can we kill it? The answer is yes – but not for long. There is a universal rule about horror stories that has been acknowledged for thousands of years: the monster never truly dies. It transforms, reforms into new shapes, people, and appears in new cultures. 

What I see in the trend of ‘Instagram Face’ is what many of us have studied in history courses: old, outdated maps loaded with prejudice and imbalanced power dynamics. The same maps created by the original white colonisers are still being drawn, only this time in eyeliner and lipstick. 

We cannot stop an entire trend in its tracks. However, we can recognise the harm it is doing to those around us. Yes, people will dismiss this. They will say, “it is just makeup, what does it matter to me?” But to have colonisation visualised on every face you scroll through means everything. And it is time that we recognise that.