I was emailing journalists on LinkedIn when my boyfriend, an artist who doesn’t believe in job titles, looked over and said, “You’re using that photo?”
It was one of me and my best friend Keiss on her annual birthday hike. We were wearing fur hats. Not necessarily professional, but definitely the kind of image I’d rather people associate with me than a corporate headshot. But still, I swapped it.
The next day, I asked my colleague to take a photo of me outside our office. The lighting was harsh, I hadn’t slept properly, I wasn’t wearing makeup. I’d just had a reaction to an LED face mask because I didn’t use the right eye protection, and my eyelids were breaking out in eczema. (E45 fixed everything.) I felt a bit fragile, so I downloaded FaceTune to blur out my eyebags.
When I went to save it, the app asked me to sign up for a seven-day trial. I said fine. Then I saw it had an AI headshot feature, £9.99 for a “professional portrait.” I justified it immediately. I work in tech, this is ‘user testing’.
What it showed me was weirdly familiar. It looked like me, but of course airbrushed and actually smiling. It even kept the dark circles under my eyes, just softened slightly. Like someone who drinks enough water. And I’d taken the photo feeling awful, with eczema, no sleep, no makeup, barely holding it together. It wasn’t disturbing because it looked fake. It was disturbing because it looked right.
I never used FaceTune as a teenager, so maybe I missed the prefrontal lobe uncanny valley moment, but now I could see it happening in real time. On LinkedIn, I kept spotting people who had clearly used the same feature. Same background, same lighting, same slightly-too-keen expression. Like we had all been processed through the same professional filter, tweaked just enough to make us legible to recruiters.
I spent the rest of the day messing around with different hairstyles. Fringe, pink bob, honey blonde. Then later, because I couldn’t stop, I got it to generate baby versions of me.
It didn’t feel profound at the time. But there was something strange about how easily the app could shape me into something I recognised.
I don’t think using FaceTune made me vain.
If anything, it made me want to take better care of my health.
To drink more water and sleep properly.
Actually read the Rio Viera-Newton book I bought to figure out my skin type.
So in a way, thank you FaceTune.
You showed me the light.
Or at least better lighting.
