Every time we smooth a wrinkle or brighten a feature, we tell a story — one that says, “I need to be edited to be seen.” But what if those edits were permanent? Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits  visualizes that haunting possibility. Using AI-driven tools designed to “enhance” beauty, she reimagines portraits of global beauty queens as algorithmically perfected versions of themselves. The results reveal the quiet violence of visual conformity — where individuality is sanded down by...

“Have you ever felt like you’re failing at a game you didn’t even know you were playing?” That question sits at the heart of Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty , Gretchen Andrew’s deeply self-aware examination of how AI manipulates our sense of self-worth. Through digitally generated pageant portraits, she reveals how artificial intelligence quietly turns beauty into a competitive system — one defined by data rather than desire. In Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty , Gretchen Andrew...

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...