When AI Makes Everyone Look the Same

AI tells us it’s “enhancing” beauty. But what happens when every enhancement looks the same?

“Our diverse bodies and faces are being compressed into a single look.” Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits confronts the digital flattening of beauty and individuality.

In her Facetune Portraits series, Gretchen Andrew confronts a growing phenomenon: the homogenization of beauty through algorithmic design. Her process begins with portraits of diverse women — Miss Nigeria, Miss Denmark, Miss Philippines — and subjects them to AI tools that promise perfection. The results are hauntingly uniform.

The AI’s idea of “improvement” erases cultural and physical diversity, replacing it with a standardized, Westernized template. The message is subtle but clear: difference is noise; perfection is conformity.

Through painterly interventions and deliberate digital contradiction, Gretchen turns this quiet violence into a visual protest. The work insists that beauty cannot be compressed into a single data-driven form — that our humanity exists in the variance the algorithm tries to remove.