Who are social media companies to tell us what is 'beautiful'?

A woman takes a selfie using a face filter. Reem Mohammed/The National

Most people who watched Snow White as a child will remember the immortal line delivered to the titular character by the wicked stepmother: “Mirror, mirror on the wall: Who is the fairest of them all?”

Now move forward to present day and consider what would happen if, instead of the stepmother eventually losing to Snow White, the mirror could use a filter to "improve" her looks?

That would be one dystopian way of re-writing the fairy tale to make it suitable for the modern era. A part of this is predicated on women (or rather, the stepmother) feeling like her looks are the most important thing. Instead of offering the younger, fairer woman solidarity, the stepmother never stops competing with her.

This modern dystopia is already with us. Filters have appeared on social media and video-calling apps to supposedly make people look their most beautiful selves. But who decides what “beautiful” really means? In the case of apps, presumably it is whomever creates the algorithms that become the arbiter of beauty standards.

Today’s version of the mean-spirited fairy-tale mirror is the "bold glamour" filter that has appeared on TikTok. It uses artificial intelligence to sharpen facial features, as though users have undergone plastic surgery or a cosmetic makeover. It’s so realistic, you can’t even tell it is an enhancement.

But there is no such thing as "objective" beauty. If you look across cultures and history, beauty ideals vary wildly. Queen Elizabeth I introduced red hair as a beauty ideal, even though before her, the colour for hair had different connotations. The 1960s British model Twiggy was famously skinny and petite, in contrast to her US predecessor Marilyn Monroe, who was famous for her curves.

A devil’s advocate might argue that pernicious beauty standards are just a fact of life – they are set by someone else or by society at large, and are sadly designed to keep some women on the back foot.

Women's self-doubt and the erosion of their self-esteem starts at a young age. In today's world of social media filters, this is now of a totally different order. Your voice – through images of yourself displayed on social media – can be telling you that you are not good enough. It is not easy to get away from that internal negativity.

I’m aware that I risk sounding like a crotchety old lady, stopping young people having creative fun. But with alarming rates of mental health and even self-harm already affecting girls, this is no joke.

To insert a voice into someone’s head at a young age that makes them believe they don't look good enough, and suggests, by way of camera filters, how you should apparently look, is setting girls up for a lifetime of doubt.

It is difficult for young women to get away from that noise, and instilling that into developing brains means doubt about body image can be permanently hardwired into the mind.

There is a little experiment I run with children – you have probably played it for fun, too. You look at four circles each of a different colour with a cross in the middle. You stare at the cross for 30 seconds. Then you switch the four coloured circles for white circles. The extraordinary thing that happens is that you still see the colour. Your brain has adjusted – and that is in just 30 seconds. Now imagine a lifetime of seeing images that are tuned to be a "perfect" ideal, which cannot actually be created in real life. Then add on to that the fact that it is your face that has been changed. You would struggle to look at yourself without constantly thinking that you need to be modified.

Plastic surgery gains in popularity as people take in, not pictures of celebrities, but filtered versions of themselves for surgeons to turn them into.

I don’t think it is a stretch to wonder if this will cause existential breakdowns in adolescents who only permit themselves to exist online and can't be in the real world because that is not their most "beautiful" self. Even if they do undergo surgery to catch up with an avatar, having a "beauty" filter is a moving set of goalposts – even after the procedure, the filters will suggest more changes.

This is not fun – it is an accelerated form of dangerous beauty ideals.

And for men who expect women to look like models, these filters will exacerbate that, making healthy relationships even harder to establish and maintain.

As a mum of two, and someone who struggled with critical voices around me telling me I’m too dark, too ugly, not good enough, I'm very worried about this. It is hard enough to unpick the damage that external voices do to your self-worth but if you are competing with yourself, how do you get back from that?