Lumen Prize: Still Image - Why are Lip Fillers So Popular?

When I think about lip fillers and so many of the beauty trends driven by AI and social media filters, I see how they’ve been designed to be consumed on a flat screen—not in real life. These aesthetics aren’t about how a body or a face looks when you encounter it in person. They’re about how that body translates into pixels, into something that fits an algorithm’s idea of attractiveness on Instagram or TikTok.

We’re not just watching beauty evolve—we’re watching it flatten.

The Algorithm’s Face: Beauty for the Screen, Not for the World

Every era has had its visual ideals, and ours just happens to be dictated by algorithms. Today, AI-generated filters and camera corrections define what “beautiful” looks like. Lip fillers, skin-smoothing, face contouring, “perfect lighting” filters—they all exist to make us look more like the versions of ourselves that exist on a phone screen.

What’s striking is that these standards aren’t built for real life. They’re optimized for how an image performs on a feed. The goal isn’t to be beautiful, but to be perceived as beautiful through a lens, through an app, through code.

Ancient Aesthetics and the Origins of the Flat Image

This isn’t a new phenomenon. If you look back to ancient Egyptian art, you’ll notice something similar. Bodies were represented from their most recognizable angles:

• The eye from the front,

• The torso from the front,

• The legs from the side.

It wasn’t about realism—it was about a system of representation that the culture understood instantly. Every figure was a visual shorthand, a way of saying, “this is what a person looks like” according to that civilization’s shared code of beauty and identity.

Today’s “Instagram face” or AI-filtered selfie isn’t so different. We’ve created new cultural hieroglyphs—digital representations of the human form optimized for legibility, not authenticity.

The Distortion of the Digital Lens

The cell phone camera doesn’t show us what we actually look like. It flattens our features, widens the nose, changes the jawline, distorts the proportions. Yet we’ve internalized those distortions as truth.

So much of the beauty economy has become about correcting ourselves for a distorted lens. We fill our lips, smooth our skin, and contour our faces—not for the mirror, but for the camera.

This is the quiet paradox of our time: the more technology promises realism, the less real our representations become.

Why “Miss Nigeria” Matters

That’s why my work, Miss Nigeria, which has been nominated for the Still Image Award, feels especially urgent.

Everything I’m describing—the way AI-driven beauty standards circulate, the way they compress us into templates, the way they reshape our identities—all of it happens in the space of the still image.

The still image is the battlefield of modern beauty. It’s where our faces are flattened, edited, filtered, approved. It’s where beauty ideals are created, repeated, and enforced.

By working directly with that format, Miss Nigeria isn’t just a commentary on beauty—it’s a confrontation. It challenges the visual logic of the algorithm, the cultural forces that decide which faces rise and which are scrolled past.

The Power of the Still Image

What happens when we reclaim the still image—not as a mirror of perfection, but as a space of resistance?

In Miss Nigeria, the image refuses to be a product of flattening. It pushes back. It asks what it means for representation to move beyond legibility, beyond filters, beyond the standardized faces of AI beauty.

We are living through a time when beauty has become a software problem. Our tools for self-representation—phones, apps, algorithms—are also the tools that erase our uniqueness. But art has always been the place where new visual languages emerge.

By re-entering the space of the still image consciously, critically, Miss Nigeria reminds us that we can rewrite those visual codes.