With the rise of anti-ageing cosmetic treatments like preventative botox and under eye filler, it’s clear that gen Z hasn’t beaten the ubiquitous fear of ageing that’s plagued generations.
This has been made even more clear by TikTok’s latest Aged filter, which uses artificial intelligence to give users a brief look into their future reflection.
Even celebrities like Ronan Kemp and Kylie Jenner coulnd’t help but catch a glimpse of their wizened faces, which cosmetic surgeon Dr Monika Kieu said was ‘so spot on.’
Aging is a privilege! It will happen to all of us, but there are definitely ways to embrace it on your own terms. Let’s commit to aging with kindness and self-confidence ❤️ ✨ #aginggracefully #agingwell #agingfilter #agedfilter #drkieutips
Kylie Jenner couldn’t help but show her disappointment with what she saw, exclaiming: ‘I don’t like it at all. No. No.’
While the majority of people are having fun with the filter, acting as themselves in 2063 for example, or testing the reliability of the filter by using it on young photographs of now-older celebrities, there’s an air of fear surrounding the lined faces, too – and it’s not new.
Trying the aged filter on celebrities’ younger pics to see if they match their older pics (pt. 2) #agingfilter #aging #trend #celebrities #jenniferaniston #series #agedseries
One TikToker said that, although she knows there’s ‘nothing wrong’ with ageing, when she noticed that the filter made her look older than other people, her gut reaction was to fix up her skin routine.
‘I’m 100% not okay with this,’ wrote another girl after using the filter.
Another said she needed to get filler ‘now’.
this filter made everybody else look 50 and flirty, why did it give ME more wrinkles than my 96 y/o grandma 🙁 i really do love the wholesome videos with this trend though. ive been nenoying imagining who we’re all going to grow up to be 🙂 there is nothing wrong with wrinkles or aging, this is simply my gut reaction after noricing the filter made me older than everybody else
The truth is, ageing filters always go viral on TikTok (remember last year’s controversial teen filter?) and there’s a reason for this. Many of us are obsessed with how we’ll look as we age – and putting it off for as long as we can.
TikToker Jareen Imam picked upon the virality of the newest filter (the third of the year, fyi) and said there were four main reasons why we fear ageing: the fear of death, a loss of independence, social isolation and uncertainty.
This was echoed by Dr Kieu: ‘The effect is viral because it manipulates the basic human fear of ageing and eventually dying,’ she said. ‘It reminds us that we are human.’
But what these commentaries failed to pick up on is the social pressure to age gracefully.
Ageism, according to the Royal Society for Public Health UK (RSPH), is one of the biggest forms of discrimination today, particularly in Europe, but it mostly goes unchallenged.
Ageism, it said, is gendered, with women in particular facing societal pressure to slow the ageing process down as much as possible.
It’s drilled into us — by the beauty industry as well as media — that ageing is bad, so there’s no wonder that there’s a morbid curiosity around it.
But, as TikToker Melissa Violin pointed out, we’d all be lucky to live that long.
Maybe it’s time to reframe the ageing process, don’t you think?
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