When I was 17, I babysat a group of preschoolers for a few hours once a week. Sometimes, these four- and five-year-olds would try to guess my age: “Are you 12?” “Are you 40?” “Are you nine?” “Are you 100?” They had no clue what any age older than their own looked like, no concept of the difference between a 9-year-old, a 29-year-old, and an 89-year-old. Today, I don t have to spend time with a toddler to have that experience; I just have to open TikTok.
“Aging” filters have gone viral on TikTok at various points over the past few years. This summer s take on the trend is set to “Let Me Clear My Throat” by DJ Kool, and the trend goes like this: You begin the video with the “aged filter” on, then, when the beat drops, take the filter off to reveal your real, younger face. When actor Ashley Tisdale participated in the trend, comments were effusive: “YOU LOOK 25,” “40!!! you literally haven’t aged,” “YOU DIDN’T AGE A DAMN DAY.” But TikTokers who haven t starred in a Disney Channel Original Movie are seeing very different comments: “I’m sorry but I literally didn t realize the filter was gone.” “Spot the difference: extremely hard edition.” “Some people should sit some trends out.” Ouch.
Anyone who s spent time online knows how it goes: Ask the internet how old you look, and you’re going to get your feelings hurt. You’re 40 and think you look 25? Well, commenters are here to tell you that you actually look 70. So why do we keep posting?
To begin, I asked an influencer Rickquell Flowers. Her video participating in the trend, posted in early August, has 22.7 million views on TikTok and counting—not to mention the various places it’s been reposted. The top-voted comments on the original: “The wrong people are choosing to do this,” “Goodbye Paris, hello France,” “before and before.” Personally, if I had millions of internet strangers telling me I look elderly, I’d be trying to move somewhere WiFi could not find me, but Flowers is taking it in good humor. She even posted a trolling follow-up video claiming that she is actually 56 (in reality, she’s 33).
“I’m just trying to give them what they want, if they want to be mad,” Flowers tells Vogue. “If I notice a trend that seems like a little bit of rage bait and I’m in the mood that day, I’ll do it.” She knows she doesn t look her best in that video: “I was hungover, I had my hair all messed up. I was like, whatever, we’re going to do it.” She’d seen enough mean comments on other people’s videos that she expected them on her own. “What’s that, they say? All press is good press?” she asks. It worked: Her viral video gained her 10K followers in one day.
While Flowers says that TikTok at large has a culture of “people just being really nasty and rude,” she adds that her usual videos demonstrating makeup techniques, generally get a kinder reaction. “There are women supporting women on there, and a lot of people are asking for makeup tutorials,” she says. A few days after going viral, Flowers posted a new video talking about the experience while doing her beauty routine. The comments are full of women praising her bone structure, her freckles, and her glowing skin.
Does this TikTok filter actually show what you ll look like as you age? Dermatologists say no, not really. “It is obviously very difficult to predict how one will age using only a video from one time frame,” says Dr. Dara Spearman, a board-certified dermatologist and owner of Radiant Dermatology in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “It does not take into account genetics, nor does it consider environmental factors such as sun exposure or smoke (cigarette, cigar, or marijuana) exposure. Finally, it doesn t factor in interventions such as skin care or procedures. Given this, the filter is unlikely to be very accurate.”
But we already knew this trend isn t going viral because of its scientific accuracy—it’s going viral because it’s fun to be mean on the internet, and in our beauty- and youth-obsessed society, an easy way to be mean is to tell a woman she looks old. “When we think of social media impacting culture, we now have a trend where people are really like, Oh, let me critique if you’re aging well. It reinforces a society that’s already doing that,” says Moraya Seeger DeGeare, MA, LMFT, cofounder of BFF Therapy in New York and Chief Clinical Strategist of fintech company Calibrate. “We’re literally saying, I know nothing else about this person, so let’s talk about how you look.”
Although commenters may be anonymous, the way you act on the internet isn’t separate from the way you act in real life, DeGeare adds: “It’s reinforcing training the way your brain looks at aging. It’s not like your brain is like, Well, that’s on the internet. So when I’m at a cafe, I’m just going to forget that.” Scrutinizing whether someone is aging “well” affects not only the way we treat people we perceive to be aging badly, but also the way we treat ourselves, she adds: “What does that look like when you’re putting on makeup in the mirror in the morning?” The solution is pretty obvious: “I just feel like as a culture, we should all do a big hard stop anytime we want to comment on someone’s looks.” But try telling that to TikTok.
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