Hi guppies,
How’s your maskne coming along? I’ve been avoiding it by tending to my skin barrier, which, fyi, is something you should look into. As Salve enters its 19th issue (my longest relationship eVeR) it feels like I am running out of road.
I mean…what else is there to say? You already know that I hate Gwyneth Paltrow, big tech, and neoliberalism. This newsletter started as a weekly dispatch of curated internet holes to salve your sorrows and ease you through a trying time. I’ve been finding it difficult to mine the web for nuggets of gold (there’s a lot of garbage to sift through) and stay true to that mission. I felt a shift when I published Grief Observed. I received a barrage of smart, honest, and engaged feedback. What I’ve really been searching for, in this hyperconnected but disaffected time, is genuine connection.
The best way I can go about giving that to myself, and hopefully to you, is by staring straight into the lens. So…..I’m going to take an intermission from supercharged rants that trash goop and Zuckerberg. This is, after all, MY newsletter and it should be all about ME. I jest, but not really. Nonfiction is my life’s work. I’m committed to this craft and what I love most about the process is my perennial wonder about how uniquely a true story can resonate. As always, I love to hear your thoughts so please feel free to drop me an email. Or share Salve with a friend! I’d truly appreciate it.
Today, I’m exposing my addiction to FaceTune. What prompted this interrogation? You might be wondering. It was a message I received in response to a selfie I posted on my Instagram story that said:
Zack your selfie game has gotten so strong this year
How’s the FaceTune addiction going? I can’t tell if you still use it or not
At first I was deeply offended. Was it so hard to believe that I could simply be snatched? My instant response was to send the original photo (which I had not edited) to prove that yes, indeed I was snatched, au naturale. Then came the bad question: had I altered myself so profoundly online, that I had disrupted other people’s perception of what I actually look like? The answer, to my own chagrin, was yes. Not only had I hoodwinked my friends & followers, I fundamentally fucked with my own self image through years of digital manipulation.
It’s tough to pinpoint the beginning of my addiction. Perhaps it was when I unearthed Photo Booth on my very first macbook. I liked all the filters but glow was my favourite—it upped the contrast and offered a soft focus, a special haze that made my skin smooth like porcelain, in a sublime even tone. I took many, many selfies. Sometimes I’d add a black and white filter, or up the saturation to an intolerable degree. Occasionally I’d add lyrics from a popular and vaguely ~meaningful~ song. But never without adding the illustrious glow first.
The photos were posted on social media, of course, but sharing was not the purpose of the experiment. The canvas was my face, which was far more interesting than a blank piece of paper. I was invested in this canvas. I worked hard to decorate it properly. I spent hours editing various portraits, distorting them—adding highlights to my hair or changing my eye colour—but most of the time, they stayed on my desktop. Only the supreme: the most flattering photo with the most genius alterations became my profile picture on Facebook. I downloaded photoshop to learn more expert retouching. Meeting the liquify tool was like shooting up for the first time. Before, with Photo Booth and glow, I had to find the right angle to hide displeasing attributes (a double chin, a wonky eye)—but liquify allowed me to work with the rawest material and literally bend it to my will. It was not so much about looking perfect, but rather, editing perfect. With the patch tool I zoomed in and removed acne. But then, as I zoomed in closer, I’d notice a stray eyebrow hair, which had to be removed too. The look I was going for was distinctly NOT human. With searing candy blue eyes and a suspiciously blurry chin, I often ended up looking like one of the botched age renderings that the police create to locate a missing child.
Like….literally who the fuck is this?!? It’s clear that these photos are not thirst-traps or glamour shots. Pictured above are sexless AI cyborgs that don’t conform to a prescribed beauty ideal. I conjured a ‘look’ out of thin air, and set a standard for myself to follow. Bizarrely, I stuck to it. Sometimes a perfectly good photo would appear—taken by a friend for example— and I’d have them pull it off Facebook, send it to me for retouching, and post it again so that I could continue to be a heinous catfish in both MY photos and TAGGED photos.
I was addicted to the control I yielded over my digital image, a power that was strikingly absent in my physical existence. I could not lower the pitch of my voice or stop talking about Gay Tings, but I could photoshop pimples out and remould my nose until I believed it was perfect. That was my agency. If the narrative ended there— in that cute anecdote about taking the power back— I guess that would be fine. BUT IT CERTAINLY DID NOT END THERE. Once I realised that I could theoretically be perceived as an ~attractive~ human being (aka sexually desirable, when I stopped being repulsed by my sexual orientation) I doubled down on this commitment to perfection.
FaceTune was launched alongside Instagram and suddenly, I was comparing myself to other people and modifying my appearance. I ditched the cyborg aesthetic and went for something more real. I edited my body to look thinner or more muscular, smoothed the pores on my skin, made my lips bigger and my eyes wider. I got really fucking good at it too. Sometimes I’d overdo it and get called out by a friend (Zack, your latest Instagram doesn’t even look like you) but like any good artificial intelligence bot, I learned. Don’t take photos against railings or brick walls. The lines get warped, and that’s a tell. Don’t make your mouth too wide. The corners where your lips meet your skin get blurry. That’s a tell.
What I hadn’t realised was that I was slowly misshaping my self perception. The story function on Instagram, before filters were introduced, was terrifying because I couldn’t immediately change what I didn’t like. If I took a picture and felt ugly, instead of reckoning with what bothered me, I reasoned that I could change it in post-production. I grew insecure about dating. I know that my pictures on tinder are basically not me. How the fuck will I feel if my date runs screaming in the opposite direction? I was completely out of touch with my physical self. Spoiler: it doesn’t feel good to look in the mirror and not recognise yourself.
I don’t FaceTune anymore and I’ve deleted all the pictures I doctored. I still get rid of the odd pimple here and there, but the reshaping is canceled. How did I shake the habit? I physically altered the things that bothered me the most, and that sucks. I got veneers in my last year of high school, cut my hair a different shape, upped my skincare game, and lost 70 pounds. Retouching is a losing battle: whether you interact intentionally with it or not, you are tacitly reminding yourself of things that should be different with each tiny tweak. When you perform this ritual habitually, your own body becomes foreign. Through the art of retouching, I blessed myself with insecurities that I did not previously have. And that is why I’m the DBOAT (dumbest bitch of all time).
Anyway, here’s the UNEDITED picture that my friend erroneously assumed was retouched.
(I understand her suspicions, tbh)
Xoxo,
Z