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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 sande

“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 , Gre

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, pornogr

Medical AI Podcast on AI beauty Standards and mental heath, plastic surgery, body dysmorphia

In Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty , Gretchen Andrew transforms AI-powered beauty into something painfully human. Her work exposes the invisible labor of self-perfection — the emotional and psychological toll of trying to meet algorithmic ideals. Gretchen Andrew explores the physical and emotional impact of digital beauty standards through her haunting quote: “My art shows you the physical scars of trying to live up to a digital ghost. The phrase “trying to live up to a

In Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty , Gretchen Andrew confronts one of the most pervasive cultural forces of our time — algorithmic beauty. A witty yet unsettling look at how AI interprets and amplifies beauty standards — through Gretchen Andrew’s newest exhibition, Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty. The exhibition playfully mimics the aesthetic polish of social media, yet underneath its wit lies a chilling reality: the digital tools we use to “perfect” ourselves are s

Beauty once celebrated individuality — the freckle, the imperfection, the unexpected. Today, that uniqueness has been replaced by algorithmic sameness. Every scroll shows the same faces, the same poses, the same “flawless” perfection. Through Facetune Portraits , Gretchen Andrew explores how digital perfection has numbed our sense of what’s beautiful. The series uses the same tools designed to “enhance” and “improve” to instead expose the psychological cost of constant optim

In Facetune Portraits , Gretchen Andrew captures the tension between authenticity and aspiration — a tension that defines how we live online. We’re often told to be different—by society, family or even algorithms. I wanted to create a single portrait where our authentic selves and the ‘ideal’ self messily coexist. Every platform encourages individuality while quietly pushing us toward a single, algorithmic idea of beauty. The result? A generation performing uniqueness within

We scroll through perfection every day. Smooth skin, symmetrical faces, impossible curves. But behind these images lies something far less human — a set of digital instructions written to imitate desire. What if the “perfect” face you saw online was never real? Facetune Portraits  by Gretchen Andrew exposes how algorithms shape our understanding of beauty — and ourselves. “That ‘perfect’ face you saw online?” Gretchen Andrew asks. “It was designed by an algorithm and doesn’t

In Paris this fall, I joined FEMGEN , a community of female-identifying and nonbinary artists who are reshaping what generative art can be — and who gets to shape it. It’s a platform rooted in openness, access, and visibility, which is deeply aligned with everything my work fights for. Because here’s the thing: “When digital art felt like an outside, it utilized that outsider persona to feel important, and then as soon as some artists started to cross the divide and get fancy

From October 15–19, 2025, I had the joy of presenting Reprogramming Reality  at Z Centar as part of Game Changer Zagreb 4.0 , in collaboration with SHPIGL. And wow — Zagreb showed up with curiosity, style, and a serious appetite for the future of art. This exhibition brought together many threads I’ve been pulling on for years: How do we see  ourselves in the digital age? Who shapes our visibility? And what happens when we hack the systems that are supposed to define us? My a

Counterfeit injectables, fraudulent credentials, lumpy lips, and droopy eyes—inside the underregulated world of med spas. By Sarah Treleaven in Elle As pressures mount driven by AI beauty standards what sort of lengths our business owners women and men going to to get the homogenized look of modern femininity and masculinity? In Facetune Portraits I look at the tension being created when we try to live up to the ai-driven ideal of how we're supposed to look. What if we cou

Lately, I’ve been watching something shift in the world of men — particularly men who hold power. For a long time, masculinity has been culturally defined as something proven through what you do : build companies, run teams, secure funding, conquer industries. Appearance was secondary, almost suspicious. A man was supposed to be above caring about how he looked. But that story seems to be over. In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal , we learned the following: Men in

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  mak

I’m thrilled to share that I was recently featured on Episode 497 of SOUND & VISION , a podcast hosted by Brian Alfred , where we dive into the creative process with artists and musicians. LISTEN In this episode, we explore my artistic journey—from studying Information Systems at Boston College  to working at Intuit and Google , and eventually pursuing art full-time, apprenticing under Billy Childish . I also share insights from my experiences exhibiting at galleries and fair

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 compari

The resulting works are unsettling, with the robotic scribbles cutting lines through the women’s bodies and making their smiling faces unrecognisable—but that discomfort is the point. Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits transform digital beauty into something unsettling—and intentionally so. In her Facetune Portraits , artist Gretchen Andrew  confronts the visual language of perfection. By using robotic motion to distort images that once embodied idealized beauty, she reveal

“When I grew up it was commonly said that celebrities and pageant queens made beauty standards impossible. Now, they are literally impossible,” says artist Gretchen Andrew . “The bodies we are seeing on social media do not exist; they are digitally manipulated portraits. I was drawn to the way technology and artificial intelligence (AI) were changing our perception of other people and of ourselves.” Gretchen Andrew discusses how AI and digital tools have made beauty standards

Portraiture has always been about capturing the irreducible essence of a person—their unique presence within flesh and bone. The body, in its three-dimensional reality, has traditionally been the anchor of identity. Yet we now live in Phase Two: an era dominated by AI-curated beauty. In this new algorithmic world, the goal is no longer to represent what is , but to reshape the image according to a manufactured ideal. This work, visualized through a grid of nine digitally morp

Making the Invisible Impacts of Technology Visible Much of the technology that defines our world works quietly—embedded in our devices, our feeds, and even our faces. Artist Gretchen Andrew  makes those invisible systems visible through her series, Facetune Portraits . Gretchen Andrew uses her Facetune Portraits to expose how invisible technologies shape our digital lives. By translating the effects of beauty filters and AI-driven tools into physical artworks, Andrew reveals