So No One Is Going To Talk About How The Face App Shows You A “Beautiful” Aged Version Of You?

Just the other day over dinner, my brother walked up to me with his phone in his hand, a cheeky grin on his face, and showed me what was on the screen that was clearly amusing him . Turns out, and I should’ve guessed considering that this is the current rage, it was a photo of him as an oldie. And you know how this happened, he was now one of them – you know, the people who download the ‘Face App’. For a second there, I did confuse it with a picture of my father, because they looked almost identical. But a moment into staring and I could see the not-so-subtle giveaways. Not even a slight pigmentation or dark circles on the face, a head full of hair without a hair transplant, and that salt and pepper look in the beard that just couldn’t have been.

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The Face App, that is now widely being downloaded because everyone is excited to see how they will look in the future. While millions are hooked and dying (excuse the very layered pun) to get a peek of how they’d look, Face App is slyly giving the masses what they want to see, as opposed to what they’ll really look like many years down the line.  Think about it, they take your young and beautiful pictures, and transform it with a few wrinkles here, a little sag there along with a weather-beaten tan and serve you a beautified version of yourself that, if we’re being honest, is not exactly how you’d look. I mean, of course unless you go for that botox at the age of 35 and then get a hair transplant and choose to colour your brows black.

And we understand, no AI could possibly give you an accurate look into the future and we don’t want that either. But in an attempt to make people comfortable with the idea of aging, it is perhaps dishing up a lie that is only easy to digest and only ever feeding our vanity, and our sanity. Hours and hours spent, pictures after pictures edited and posted with a glint in the eye, ‘Look, how terrific I am going to look even at 65!’, they subtly imply. Couples are fantasizing about how they’ll look having grown old together which is great but it would be better if they weren’t sitting with divorce papers in their hands. How is it any different from the Photoshop that celebrities use to make their pictures more palatable? We complain about the over contoured faces of actress in magazines, or that too perfect to be true nose for the actors, but when it comes to seeing us all pretty in those 50 shades of grey, we’re all aboard the ageing filter train.

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And not just that, with recent reports doling in about how all of this may just be a very clever attempt by the Russians to get in on private data and photos of the million users, to use it at their beck and call, all rights reserved, Face App has literally come out as nothing substantial. And don’t get us wrong here. We have no intentions of busting a time-lapse party that the world is in on, we are more than okay to take it as fun and games. But we just feel that it may again be stereotyping the standards of beauty that society sets for its people. To see and expect how we must look at 65. And then later, be disappointed if it isn’t so. Because, and allow us to be harsh, your head is probably not going to be full of hair. It’s probably not going to be that thick. Hair thinning is a real thing. Age and sun spots are a real thing. Your teeth might be falling out. It’s not going be easy. Things that the Face App conveniently doesn’t show you.

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Ageing is anyway a difficult process. Not just biologically, but also mentally and emotionally. It’s not only the close ups that are showing you reality now, the mirror is giving away a lot of details. So maybe before we set our expectations on the unrealistic ageing beauty standards, we must remind ourselves that it doesn’t matter how we look like when we’re old, as long as love ourselves regardless of that, we’d be good.