Jia Tolentino - “Instagram Face” and Our Inverted Beauty Standards | the Daily Show

Thank you for writing a New Yorker article that didn't take me six months to read. Oh, you're so welcome. Appreciate that. Um, let's start with your 2019 New Yorker article, which coined the phrase Instagram face. And then we'll get into your latest piece. What is Instagram face? So I think it was about a decade ago where probably I was not alone in noticing that kind of all of the most visible women on the internet had started to morph into the same face. This kind of singular thing was emerging. It was a face that, it intrigued me because it was a face that seemed to have been kind of contoured by the algorithm. It was dictated. It was a face that people would click on and like, and people were kind of getting it slowly en masse. And as such, I mean, and so I wrote about it because it seemed then like the most visible fulcrum of this larger thing that was happening in which the corporate incentives of trillion dollar social media companies were kind of beginning to seem to many people like deeply personal desires. And all of this, you know, it was just written on the face in a way that was interesting. Well, this piece, the latest piece you call our plastic surgery nightmare, but it really focuses on the face. What is it about the face? I'm looking at your face right now. You're looking at my face. If you have a face, listen to this answer. Why is that the focal point? So historically, as far back, you know, as ancient times, right? I mean, the face, we love looking at faces. We love looking at each other's faces. You know, we're New Yorkers. We like to sit on the train and stare at each other. The face, you can gather an enormous amount of human information about someone. Their temperament, their life, their selfhood. It's their soul. You know, the face is the portal through which all of this information is given to us and that when we love looking at each other and reading each other's faces. And in the last few years, it has started to feel to me more that the face is being kind of denuded of human information and is serving on social media, especially like through our phones, more as a kind of a disciplinary guide and kind of a consumer manual. You know, and also, I mean, people's faces, they're beginning to look kind of nuts. Yes. You know? People's faces are looking nuts? Look, you obviously stare at people's faces on the subway. I stare at their calves. For Jets tattoos? You just don't get as much information from someone's calf, but what's strange about what you're saying, the face is this portal to our soul, to our experiences, to our adventures, to our loves. Yet what everyone's doing to them now is they're eliminating all that stuff. Yeah. And the thing, you know, the thing that is interesting to me is that these faces are ostensibly becoming more beautiful, right? All of these, the face, the version of Instagram face that's emerging, you know, I mean, people are also, things have escalated, right? People are fully getting kind of head transplants, you could say. People are just, ages are being invented that have never been invented before. Like these wild things are happening, but what's striking to me is that, you know, when I say the face that people have now, like we can all probably picture that face, right? It's not, it's a face that the algorithm, that Instagram, that TikTok, that social media has deemed beautiful insofar it is extremely profitable, but it is not a face that humans take pleasure in. It's... I mean, it's laughable sometimes when you see the face. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of pleasure. Yeah. But what has changed in plastic surgery that's made this more, is it more approachable for everyone to change their face or is it just that we are seeing so many more images than we used to? I used to go to the grocery store with my mom when I was a kid and I would see three magazines, right? And you would see the women on the magazine and that was kind of it. But now a kid is seeing thousands of images. Right. Has plastic surgery become more approachable to everybody too? Well, 10 years ago when people were starting to get Instagram face, it was still kind of a coastal elite and celebrity thing, the sort of injections that would make everyone look like a hybrid of Kim Kardashian, Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, you know, this singular... Michael Kosta, yeah. That wasn't a joke. Why is everybody laughing about that? And now it's, it's, it is, it's democratically available. You can Klorna your injections, you know, like it's, it's quite democratically available, but the, and it's part of this larger thing where you were saying like what has happened with phones and the sort of larger regime of, of surveillance and broadcasting that again is this enormous profit center for tech companies that hate us, you know, they, they can, they put ordinary people in the position of what only celebrities used to be before where the face and the body are a potential source of profit and that they could be looked at at any time, recorded at any time, broadcast, and that the better they look, the more money they would make you. This is, we, we used to kind of formally recognize this as a demented way of living and now it is kind of the universal one for anyone with a phone and an instinct to self broadcast, which is most young people and many of us maybe, right? People are being more transparent about saying this is what I had done. I mean, you'd write about this in the article, tweeting out, this is what I had injected. I shuddered at that, but is that, is this transparency better for us? What's your thought on that? I, I wrote this in the piece, but I, I think of, you know, it's, it's a bit of a recursive circular whirlpool-ish nightmare where it's like, you know, oh, it's good that people are disclosing so that we will know what they do so that it can be more approachable for us to do too. Right. And then on and on and on. I'm sort of like, it's, it, it reminds me a little bit of kind of a, of a land acknowledgement. It's when a celebrity acknowledges plastic surgery, it's like acknowledging the unjust system that you are about to perpetuate just a little bit more. Right. And this isn't just women. Yes. So feminism has won, men are now obsessed with beauty and looks. Yes. Talk a little bit about looks maxing. I truly, this was, this was something I did not know about, believe it or not. How is this infiltrated male culture? When I was in my twenties and I was working for all the feminist media that no longer exists, it, it, it seemed to me, it seemed to me that, who really won now, but it's, but it seemed to me that there was this broader impulse to designate everyone as beautiful as if it was politically important. And I remember at the time in my twenties having this feeling inside me, I was like, no, no, no, no, no. It should matter less. Like actually it's deescalation that would be, that would free us. It would be. And so what we have now is not that, you know, the, the, the previous decade of more mainstream feminism freed women from beauty work, you know, deescalated the situation. It merely escalated for men. So now everyone is living in the nightmare that has existed for women since, you know, like mass commercial beauty industry. What you write about is these men, one of them hitting his jaw with a hammer. Let's not say his name. Let's not say, I don't know. Yes. Um, but what's sad about it to me was you used to care about your looks so you could try to have sex. That was the whole thing. Maybe I'll work out so I can, I can get laid. But now it's maybe I'll, I'll deform my face so I'll get more likes. I can get more Twitch streams, followers, whatever you call it on Twitch. Yes. It's strange to think it's strange to be looking back out there. Sex feels good. I mean, it is so strange to be having this discussion in 2026 and thinking like, what happens to just want it? Like these are not pure. These are not noble impulses, right? Me wanting to look at a beautiful person cause it's not, cause it feels good because it brings me pleasure. You know, us wanting to become more attractive so that we can have more interesting sex with a more interesting person. Like it's, it's wild that that now feels kind of, it feels quaint and beautiful because, yeah. Cause that's the thing, this, the, the regime of the, of the looks maxers, which grew out of a reactionary right wing men's rights in cell kind of conglomeration that rose on the internet last decade. It is, it's kind of, it configures beauty as something you do to, to display dominance. Sex is something that maybe can be acquired as a commodity, but it's the way they speak about it is not pleasure. It's not human pleasure. It like the whole concept of human pleasure that our bodies and our faces and each other's bodies and faces bring us just as people existing in the world. It's, it's absent entirely from the new regime of this kind of the only, the only, the only one that is the only entity that is loving it is the phone is the phone. Well, that's where this all either started or leads to, I mean, caring about beauty and looks didn't start with the cell phone, but it's hard to not read your work and not get more and more angry at the phone or tech. And I wonder how we arm ourselves to be better or to deal with that in a more optimistic way. I think, you know, the, there's a way that this is manifesting really specifically with AI, right? If you ask the consequences of all of the most visible women on the internet, having the same face has become really obvious where if you ask an image generator to show me a normal woman, they will show you, Oh, white, thin, conventionally beautiful young woman with Instagram face, right? AI through that framework, through that, you know, through, through that structure of seeing if you are not optimized and beautiful, you are scarcely human and you scarcely exist. And I think that, and I think what we can do is we can, we can, we can strive at the very least. I mean, we both have children and we, and I think about this with them, it's like, I, you know, they're going to get lost in the sauce. We all get lost in the sauce. But my, one of my few real hopes for them is that they retain the ability to look at the world and other people, including themselves in it and see them the way that a human would see them and not that the way, not the way that a phone would. And something as simple as that kind of excising the phone vision within ourselves seems worthwhile and fun. Yeah. I mean, let's try to live. The phone is an amazing tool. I mean, you can, you can order a car, you can order food, you can transfer money. You can, I mean, how do you even parent without a phone now? Like my school is sending me updates, the WhatsApp group. I didn't see that. I'm staying off my phone. Yeah, exactly. But it's really scary. And I think it's really helpful. I know, I know I've called your work scary a few times. That's meant to be a compliment because it should be waking us up to potentially what, what we are dealing with. I want to talk about Mar-a-Lago face for a second because it's so beautiful. They're all looking like the same robot. Yeah. Like it's strangely, it's strange that our president of the United States lives in this place and all the women are having this robotic face. And I can't help but think, not just the women, not just women. Yes. Sorry. Don't leave him out. Leave him out. But it also has this relationship with tech. Like the humans are becoming the robots. I just wanted to say that. Well, I, I enjoy Mar-a-Lago face because I do take an enormous amount of human pleasure in it because it is quite funny to me. It's, you know, it's an amazing exemplar of gender affirming care and administration that is opposed to it. Love that. And, and we love, you know, we love to see them support gender affirming care. And it's also, you know, it, it, Mar-a-Lago face, it's almost, it almost feels quaint to me now because these days, you know, people can get six hour facelifts and come out looking exactly like they did 35 years ago. Mar-a-Lago face is just so profoundly artificial looking that it's like, oh, this is actually beautiful. You're showing the work, you know, at this point, I appreciate that. And it kind of bears the same relationship as I wrote to, you know, the Mar-a-Lago face bears the same relationship to reality that the administration does in general. And so, and so it's all very fitting and coherent. Lastly, can, are we so far in that it's impossible or can we change our beauty standards to appreciate more human flaws, wrinkles, scars, receding hairline? You know, you watch a movie from the 1940s, all the men, it is receding hairlines. They almost look more handsome now to me. And I'm just, maybe I'm saying that because it's going, but can we, can we change some things? I think, I think that following the sort of axis of pleasure, just our deep human physical instincts for pleasure as, as viewers, but also as producers will get us really far. You know, I think we all, we all watch movies from the olden days, such as the early 2000s. And we see beautiful people with beautiful faces that are just actual faces. And we feel that it feels better than watching a lot of faces now. And I think we can follow, like, that's the way out. We, we, people don't, people don't like what's happening to faces. You can, like, if you say to anyone, like, isn't, it's kind of nuts what's happening to people's faces. Everyone knows exactly what you're talking about instantly. We want, I think we have to remind ourselves as the entire AI sort of regime wants to dictate that what, whatever is human is, is inferior for being imperfect. I think we just have to remember that for a very, very long time, we believed that actually it's our imperfections that make us interesting and human and worthwhile. And we know that about our friends. We know that of our partners. We know that of our children. And I think we can know that about strangers and people we see through our phones too, I hope. I hope anyone under the age of 21 is hearing this saying, our imperfections, that is what makes you interesting and special and someone that you want to be and hang around. That's my opinion. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. You're the best. Our public to read at TheNewYorker.com. Gia Tolentino!