Everyone Is Becoming Obsessed With Making Themselves "Hotter" and Older with FaceApp

A new app is becoming all the rage with its ability to morph faces to make them look older or "hotter".

It’s called FaceApp and while at face value, it seems like a bunch of fun, there’s quite a few troubling issues with it.

The morphs included with the app are two versions of teeth smiles, an ability to make a person look younger or older, a 'flash' morph and the ability to change the gender of the person (you have the option of male or female).

There’s no denying that it’s a fun little app to mess around with, but there have already been criticisms surrounding the ‘flash’ filter, which until very recently was named the ‘hot’ filter.

The flash filter whitens the photo and smooths out all imperfections and even some natural features. The issue here is that it is holding users to Western-Anglo beauty standards that conflate being white with beauty.

@TheTyroneMagnus OMG I CAN'T #FaceApp pic.twitter.com/gKW5CAnrP2

— AdikTheOne (@AdikTheOne) April 13, 2017

One review on the Apple store complained that the app was disrespectful to people with darker skin tones.

Elsewhere, Twitter is exploding with morphed images of their own faces as well as other well-recognised figures.

Not everyone's feeling it though.

me: uses face app
me: has an elevated sense of existential doom

— Chumney (thats me) (@smorganator) April 24, 2017

Despite this, CEO Yaroslav Goncharov told Mashable that the app is one of a kind with no others being close to the quality of it.

It's important to remember that while you're having fun, the app's attempt (or lack of it) at inclusivity is quite poor and instead reinforces old tropes of racist beauty standards.

So, App responsibly.

Photo: FaceApp