Half the things done in this world are to make things appear what they’re not, said a wise man.
Social media filters fall in that ‘half’ the wise man is talking about. There is a ridiculous perception, that’s going around today, that social media filters will completely eliminate the make-up and skin-care industry, says Dr Kavita Mariwalla.
Here, she opens up about how, in our society, the notion of good looks is tied to one’s self-esteem and how technology has begun to play a key role in our perception of beauty
For a dermatologist, beauty is beyond just skin-deep, says Dr Mariwalla.
As humans, through societal conditioning, we have been trained to perceive beauty through our ideas of symmetry and shape. But seldom, we care to go deeper to see that the health of our skin has a direct connection to our overall well-being, she says.
Dr Mariwalla’s point of contention with social media filters is that it articulates two enormous lies: the first is that it labours in the error that how one looks to others’ eyes is enough to make one feel complete in themselves.
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The second one is far more damaging than the first one: you don’t look good enough, and you need the precision of machines and algorithms to give a set of options of preset looks that you can access with a click of a button.
Such irrational notions in teenage audiences cause a great amount of anguish and kills the individuals’ self-esteem, says Dr Mariwalla.
Technologists just hand-out give these modern toys to young, unsuspecting, vulnerable consumers who then are exposed to severe mental and societal trauma that they inevitably bring with themselves into the greater society.
For all the nay-saying, Dr Kavita Mariwalla is not tech-averse. There can be positive results from such trends and experiments in the longer run, she says.
The more youngsters and teenagers get used to these toys, the quicker we will have on our hands a generation whose idea of beauty is sterile, neatly organized, templatized, and easy to handle, she says.
Indeed, when everything is the same, there is no room for diversity, contrast, or clash in that scenario. If everything, including our idea of beauty, is homogenized, perhaps there would be more harmony and peace in our world. But we cannot achieve peace and harmony at the cost of the well-being of our teenagers, can we?
