You’re Comparing Yourself to Faces That Don’t Exist | Facetune Portraits

In the past, beauty standards were shaped by celebrities, magazines, and pop culture.

Today, they’re shaped by algorithms. The faces we see online — smoothed, resized, and filtered — often exist only as data, not reality.

A short reflection on how Facetune Portraits exposes the impossible beauty ideals we now measure ourselves against — ones that don’t even exist in real life.

“You’re not just comparing yourself to other people anymore,” says Gretchen Andrew. “You’re comparing yourself to a face and a body that often literally do not exist.”

Through her series Facetune Portraits, Andrew confronts the normalization of digital perfection. By taking the same tools used for selfies and applying them to fine art, she turns social media’s quiet distortions into visible scars. Each portrait becomes a mirror of what technology has done to our collective idea of beauty — a reminder that even our most casual edits carry cultural weight.

The work invites us to question: if perfection can be generated, what does authenticity mean anymore?