From the Selfie to the Avatar: Beauty, Bias, and the Digital Self
Mathilde Friis reflects on our shifting definitions of beauty in the digital age.
“The real question isn’t whether beauty is liberating or constraining, but how we use it, and who gets to decide.”
Mathilde Friis
We used to check our reflections in bathroom mirrors. Now, we check them in selfies, in stories, on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. A flick of the screen shows our face, but a little smoother, a little more symmetrical, with a glow. In this world, we don’t just see ourselves. We edit ourselves. We curate. We compare. We present. We are always watching ourselves being looked at; the difference now is that it is through a digital screen that refracts back, where we are not only seeing ourselves but constantly seeing everyone else.
This ambivalence isn’t entirely new. In the 1990s, feminist author Naomi Wolf argued that as women gained public power, beauty standards intensified to keep them in check. For Wolf, “beauty is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact”. Decades later, she reflected on the impact of digital technology on beauty, comparing its limiting possibilities in the past to the endless opportunities for reinvention, liberation or dystopian control that it presents today. So, are we escaping the beauty myth, or just rewriting its code?
Since the internet’s commercial rise in the 1990s, many have speculated on what this new digital world might mean for the representation of identity. In its early days, cyberfeminists imagined a kind of techno-utopia, where gender might dissolve and bodies could be reimagined, inspired by Donna Haraway’s “cyborg” a feminist call to arms that was part woman, part machine, disrupting binaries. But like all utopias, the dream met the limits of our physical reality. The internet didn’t erase gender or racial boundaries. It replicated them. Platforms that promised liberation were embedded with old biases. While the medium was new, the pressures remained the same.
Still, the age of digital self-curation owes much to earlier experiments in virtual identity. Take Second Life, a digital gaming world popularised in the early 2000s where users can build avatars and live out alternate selves: hyper-feminine, animal, genderless, fluid. Beauty here wasn’t bound by physical rules, which offered a kind of freedom. In these spaces, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff noted that users knowingly constructed identities. That awareness, the performance of self, reveals something deeply human: the desire to be seen, to belong, to be beautiful.
At the brink of the new millennium, a major shift occurred with the introduction of the first mobile phone featuring a front-facing camera in 1999 by Japanese manufacturer Kyocera. Though selfies existed before (notably in Japan’s purikura photo booths), the global explosion came in the 2010s alongside social media platforms. Suddenly, we had a permanent stage for self-documentation. Snapchat pushed this further with Lenses AR filters that added puppy ears, glowing skin, and cartoon hearts. Playful, yes, but also persuasive. These filters didn’t just decorate; they shaped ideals. Facetune, released in 2013, was equally a pioneering editing tool for altering and perfecting faces. They quietly taught us what a desirable face should look like.
Beauty today isn’t just about makeup or style. It’s about pixels, data, and code. Which brings us back to an old question: are these tools liberating or are they digital versions of the same impossible standards? The answer is, of course, both.
In the digital age, beauty isn’t fixed. It isn’t simply inherited or applied, it’s assembled and orchestrated. Algorithmically suggested. Softened, sharpened, selected. It’s how we present ourselves online, and how we interpret others in a stream of curated images. Beauty has become performance, projection, and negotiation. We scroll through thousands of faces a day; friends, influencers and AI-generated models. Everyone is polished, filtered, and lit for attention.
Humans, however, have always performed beauty. Throughout history, from Ancient Egypt and Imperial China to the Victorian period, global cultures have used available technologies and at times, endured pain to shape their bodies in the pursuit of beauty. What’s changed now is the speed, the reach, and the level of disconnection from the physical body. A CGI influencer like Lil Miquela who is ethnically ambiguous, algorithmically perfected and doesn’t exist offline reflects the strange realities of beauty today. She’s not human, but she plays the role convincingly, raising urgent questions about who gets to be seen, and who designs the face of the future. Today’s beauty isn’t just enhancement, it's invention.
Few artists confront digital beauty more radically than ORLAN. In Omniprésence (1992), she live-streamed plastic surgery to galleries worldwide, transforming her face into a living critique by highlighting the absurdity of Western beauty ideals. Her body became a public canvas, raw, theatrical, defiant. Long before filters, she was using cosmetic surgery not to conform, but to challenge and liberate. For ORLAN, beauty isn’t an aspiration but a confrontation.
Digital makeup artist Ines Alpha, by contrast, invites us into a world of dreamlike transformation. Blending 3D software, digital filters, and a shimmering printed mask to create makeup that blooms in impossible ways, her work hovers and mutates, unbound by realism. Her vision of beauty isn’t corrective; it’s speculative and full of opportunities for reinvention. She invites us to ask, what if we stopped chasing perfection and started imagining something else entirely?
Textile artist Qualeasha Wood brings a spiritual lens to the digital. Blending tapestry, embroidery, and glitch aesthetics, she explores how the Black femme body is seen, shaped, and commodified online. Her pixelated self-portraits reclaim space in an environment that often surveils and distorts. Her work is part icon, part protest, rooted in faith, resistance, and digital defiance.
Each of these artists featured in the Virtual Beauty exhibition uses the digital not just to reflect identity, but to reshape it, asking what beauty can become when the body is no longer the limit. Through these artists, a common thread emerges; the digital self is a site of tension. It promises freedom yet mirrors the very systems we hoped to escape. Filters might make you look like a Kardashian, but they also promote a kind of uniformity, one that spills back into the physical world through cosmetic enhancements and surgery, creating a constant feedback loop between the digital and the physical.
Beauty is political and in this post-internet age, artists like ORLAN, Ines Alpha, and Qualeasha Wood, among many others, remind us that beauty doesn’t have to be a trap. It can be a tool. A canvas. A protest. A dream. The real question isn’t whether beauty is liberating or constraining, but how we use it, and who gets to decide.
If we are to be the makers of our image, let it be with awareness. Let it be with playfulness. Let it be with power. And let it include everyone.