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At 8:05 a.m. on the Central line, a young woman angles her phone toward the train window, letting the light fall across her cheekbone just so. A thumb swipe, and suddenly the pores vanish, the nose slims, the lips bloom with symmetry. She smiles faintly, then posts. By the time the train pulls into Oxford Circus, her filtered face is already collecting likes from friends, colleagues, and strangers alike.
Once upon a time, beauty lived in magazines. You could close the cover of Vogue and walk back into the real world, safe from comparison until the next glossy issue hit the shelves. But now beauty is everywhere, all at once, coded into algorithms that decide which faces rise to the top of our feeds — and, increasingly, which features my patients believe they ought to have.
In consultations, the new beauty icon is not Audrey Hepburn or Angelina Jolie. It is a patient’s own selfie, passed through a filter until the skin is poreless, the jawline is cut sharp as glass, and the eyes tilt upwards at an angle borrowed from a Californian influencer.
“I just want to look more like this,” a woman will say, handing me her phone. The image glows with an impossible radiance, flawless yet oddly plastic. The irony is that this never existed. Not in the mirror, not in the original camera roll, not even in reality. It is a mirage conjured by technology, a fantasy so widely circulated it begins to feel like truth.
The result is a narrowing of beauty into what the internet has dubbed “Instagram face.” You know it instantly: luminous skin, fox-like eyes, pillowy lips, contoured cheeks, a perfectly proportioned nose. It appears again and again, from London to Dubai to São Paulo, until it feels less like a trend and more like a global uniform.
Patients come to me not seeking transformation, but correction — convinced their unfiltered face is somehow deficient compared to the smooth clone staring back from their screen.
Of course, beauty ideals have always been standardised. In the 1950s, Hollywood studios churned out near-identical starlets with arched brows, red lips, and hourglass figures. In the 1990s, heroin chic demanded angular hips, hollow cheeks, and a studied air of exhaustion.
But there is a difference. Those ideals arrived monthly on a glossy cover or flickered across cinema screens. Today, the ideal refreshes every three seconds, backed by the weight of likes, comments, and shares. Beauty is no longer simply admired — it is scored, ranked, and monetised.
When Marilyn Monroe walked into a room, she was compared to other women. When a young woman posts a selfie today, she is compared to an entire database of faces, weighted by an algorithm that knows which features keep us staring longest. It is competition on an industrial scale.
On Harley Street, I see the toll this takes. Patients confess they are exhausted, not by ageing itself, but by the constant comparison.
“I don’t want to look fake,” one said to me recently. “I just don’t want to look like the only one who hasn’t done anything.”
Another showed me a filtered selfie and whispered: “This is the version of me I wish people saw.” She was embarrassed, as though admitting to a secret indulgence. Yet she is not alone. Increasingly, women arrive not with celebrity photos, but with their own digitally perfected doubles.
This is the quiet crisis of algorithmic beauty:
Here I tread carefully. A deep plane facelift can restore what time has taken: cheeks lifted back to their rightful place, jawlines clarified, necks freed from cords. It can give back harmony, balance, and vitality. But it cannot, and should not, replicate the hyper-symmetry of a filter.
In fact, when a patient leaves my clinic looking refreshed yet still recognisably herself, that is the real triumph.
When she looks in the mirror and says, “Yes, that’s me again” — that is the moment no algorithm can deliver.
This obsession with the filtered self is not happening in isolation. It mirrors broader cultural currents: AI-generated avatars, metaverse profiles, even dating apps where entire conversations begin and end with a photo. The line between beauty and technology is blurring faster than we can process.
In South Korea, clinics now offer “selfie surgery” — procedures designed specifically to make patients look more like their filtered photos. In Los Angeles, teenagers as young as sixteen ask for lip lifts and buccal fat removal, citing TikTok trends. In London, I hear women compare jawlines with the same seriousness they once reserved for handbags.
The danger is not only that algorithms narrow beauty into sameness. It is that they erode agency. If a machine dictates which faces receive approval, choice begins to feel like illusion. But perhaps the boldest rebellion is not perfection, but presence.
To walk into a room looking not like a template, but unmistakably, confidently yourself. To let your beauty be a living, breathing signature, not a coded equation.
Because the algorithm can code smoothness, symmetry, and light. What it cannot code is charisma, vitality, or the spark of individuality that makes someone unforgettable.
And that, in the end, is the only algorithm worth following.
© 2025 · Beauty and the City by Dr. Dirk J. Kremer
Published: December 2025 · Harley Street, London
All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish this article without permission.
