The Discomfort Is the Point: Unmasking the Facetune Portraits

In Facetune Portraits, Gretchen Andrew transforms the familiar aesthetics of social media filters into something raw and unsettling. What begins as a digital “enhancement” becomes an act of distortion — robotic scribbles slicing through women’s faces, fragmenting their bodies, and turning once-perfect smiles into abstract, disquieting forms.

Robotic scribbles cut across smiling faces — revealing the hidden violence of digital beauty. Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits make that discomfort impossible to ignore.

That discomfort is deliberate.Andrew’s work forces us to feel what digital perfection hides: the erasure of individuality beneath algorithmic ideals. Each manipulated image becomes a mirror of the quiet violence performed by the apps we casually use to “fix” ourselves.

Instead of presenting beauty as seamless, she exposes its fractures. Instead of erasing imperfection, she renders it visible — in glitch, in scribble, in distortion.

By making these invisible manipulations tangible, Facetune Portraits reframes digital tools as both artistic medium and cultural critique.