Faces That Don’t Exist | Gretchen Andrew

Today, young women are comparing themselves to faces and bodies that literally do not exist.This is not a metaphor — it’s the reality of AI-driven beauty culture.

Filters and editing apps generate a world of digital ideals that have no physical counterpart. They blend millions of data points into one perfect face — smooth, symmetrical, and statistically irresistible. But the more we engage with these images, the more they reshape our sense of self.

 Today young women are comparing themselves to faces and bodies that literally do not exist.

I began Facetune Portraits to make this distortion visible. I wanted to see what happens when you take the tools designed to “improve” women’s faces and let them reveal their own bias. The results were disturbingly consistent. Every portrait, no matter who it started as, was restructured toward the same narrow ideal: thinner, whiter, softer, more passive.

These faces do not exist in nature — Gretchen Andrew says their power is real. They shape how we see ourselves, how we photograph ourselves, how we measure beauty and worth.

My work isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about understanding its influence. By transforming AI manipulation into art, Facetune Portraits reclaims authorship over the digital gaze. The portraits confront what happens when beauty becomes a dataset — when individuality becomes noise to be optimized away.

The project’s acquisition by the Whitney Museum affirms that this conversation belongs in art history — not just online. We are living in a time when fantasy is marketed as self-expression and digital distortion is mistaken for empowerment.

If we don’t name what’s unreal, it becomes the standard.Facetune Portraits insists on seeing the difference.