

The human body is an unusual sort of Instagram subject: it can be adjusted, with the right kind of effort, to perform better and better over time. Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past. Accounts such as Insta Repeat illustrate the platform’s monotony by posting grids of indistinguishable photos posted by different users-a person in a yellow raincoat standing at the base of a waterfall, or a hand holding up a bright fall leaf. The aesthetic is also marked by a familiar human aspiration, previously best documented in wedding photography, toward a generic sameness. Instagram, which launched as the decade was just beginning, in October, 2010, has its own aesthetic language: the ideal image is always the one that instantly pops on a phone screen. A face that looks like it’s made out of clay.”

The celebrity makeup artist Colby Smith told me, “It’s Instagram Face, duh. tiger,” Cara Craig, a high-end New York colorist, observed to me recently. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic-it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski). It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips.
#PERFECT FACE TEMPLATE PHOTOSHOP SURGEON SKIN#
It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face.
