Thanks to apps like Snapchat and Instagram introducing various filters that we can apply during our selfies to make ourselves look silly, look beautiful, and so on, it seems to have created a side-effect which is that it is apparently driving requests from teens for cosmetic surgery that will make them look as good as their selfies.
In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s Facial Plastic Surgery (via TNW), Dr. Neelam Vashi, director of the Ethnic Skin Center at Boston Medical Center coined the term “Snapchat dysmorphia”, where this is apparently a “worrying new trend” that seems to involve teens wanting to look more like their selfies.
Selfie: A journey to self exploration
According to Vashi, it seems that teens are starting to like what they see in their selfies thanks to filters masking certain imperfections, so much so that they actually want to resemble their selfies in real life. The American Medical Academy of Facial and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery is claiming that 55% of clinicians are seeing patients who wanted to look better in their selfies, representing a 13% increase from the previous year.
In a report from Inverse, Kaylee Kruzan, a Ph.D. candidate who works in at Cornell’s Social Media Lab said, “There has been some work suggesting that with social media-induced plastic surgery people come to value, and relate to, the idealized images they create on social media over their actual felt body, and strive to attain ‘ideal’ standards through body modification.”
