Do you feel comfortable – nay, confident – when posting a picture on Instagram that isn’t edited? Or a selfie that isn’t already altered using a filter? With the option of “beautifying” ourselves just a click or swipe away, we’ve gotten used to a certain clean, angular image for our faces. Pores? Hidden. Wrinkles? Smoothened out. Flat nose? Made smaller or higher. But without realising, this inability to accept ourselves as we are (unfiltered and unedited) is building a foundation for self-hate, misconceptions of beauty and a society that feels like everything needs to be airbrushed perfection.
To remind people of how important it is to learn to love your unfiltered self, 28-year-old makeup artist Sasha Louise Pallari has taken to Instagram to start the ‘#filterdrop’ campaign. The UK-based model has been posting images of herself with and without filters, to highlight how different filters can make you look. However, in her words, filters merely “blur your imperfections and drive your self-esteem into the ground.”
“Please think about what using filters all the time is doing to our already damaged society. A LOT of money is made from us not feeling good enough.”
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In a video she posted on her Instagram profile (which has now been viewed over 50,000 times), Pallari explains why she started the ‘#filterdrop’ campaign in the first place. According to her, she was triggered by two different things:
- A brand reposting the Instagram stories of an influencer with a huge following, who was advertising some makeup products but with a filter on.
- Stop people from being dependent on filters to feel good.
She says,
“The reason why I created #filterdrop is to challenge brands who think it’s acceptable to repost content or work falsely advertising beauty products using a filter. At the same time, I am trying to make a change in the way that filters are used so that people aren’t dependent on them, they don’t feel like they need them every single day, every single time they post. When we do that, people are going to see real textures, they’re going to see real flaws and that’s going to make them feel good enough as well.”
Pallari goes on to elaborate on how Instagram has allowed for society to continue to think that unrealistic standards of beauty, weight and body image are okay. Instead, what she wants is for people to feel confident and comfortable without these ‘beauty filters’.
However, she does make it a point to say that we don’t have to go cold turkey with filters.
“This isn’t about never using them – not everybody is going to be confident enough to not use them and even if you are confident enough to not use them, sometimes they can be fun but that’s a totally different thing. If we all try to use them less, we’re just going to be more accepting of who we are without them.”
Needless to say, the positive campaign has been picking up traction on social media, with many only now realising just how dependant they were on filters and how toxic this dependency had become.
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Research done the charity ‘Girlguilding’ (as reported by Bustle) highlighted that two out of five of the young women surveyed “feel upset” that they can’t look like the way they do online with a third of respondents claiming that they would not post selfies online without using a filter to change their appearance.
With this campaign, here’s to hoping for a more realistic understanding of beauty as well as more self-acceptance.
*Cover image credits: Woman smiling in greyscale: Photo by Ilona Panych on Unsplash Neon signage: Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash
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