When AI Decides What Beauty Looks Like: Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits

From Miss Nigeria to Miss Denmark — Gretchen Andrew reveals how AI flattens global beauty into a single Western ideal.

In Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty, Gretchen Andrew exposes the quiet violence of algorithmic aesthetics. Her observation — “Despite the different nationalities of the women in the images, from Miss Nigeria to Miss Denmark, AI wants to alter them all according to what its internet searches define as the perfect female body; a Western, rake thin, pornographic one it seems” — captures how digital systems codify centuries of bias into a single template for beauty.

AI’s definition of perfection, built from biased data and visual hierarchies, reproduces a familiar fantasy: white, Western, hypersexualized. By inputting pageant contestants from around the world and allowing algorithms to “enhance” them, Andrew demonstrates how artificial intelligence transforms cultural diversity into uniformity — erasing difference in pursuit of a marketable ideal.

The result is both seductive and disturbing. Each portrait carries the tension between individuality and conformity, between the subject’s origin and the algorithm’s rewriting. The series functions as both critique and documentation — a digital ethnography of beauty engineered by machines.

Building on her international acclaim — including the Untitled Art Miami Beach Acquisition Award and exhibitions at Hope 93 Gallery (London) and Heft Gallery (New York) — Gretchen Andrew continues her exploration of technology, gender, and control through conceptual play and visual subversion.