“The more frequently someone is exposed to the same body type, facial features, skin texture, or overall appearance ideal, the more the brain can begin to register that image as the ‘default’ way someone is supposed to look,” Emma says.
Over time, anything outside of that can feel abnormal and unfamiliar. When you don’t look like everyone else on social media, feelings of being “different” or “not enough,” may arise, Emma says. But the issue is not seeing an attractive person. “It is the meaning our brain attaches to that comparison,” Emma says. “It becomes the belief that ‘if I do not look like this, something is wrong with me.’” What makes this moment particularly challenging, Emma adds, is that it’s hard for people to distinguish what’s real and what’s not real on social media. Since people can apply filters and use AI to edit photos of themselves, much of our modern standard of beauty is a look that can’t actually be replicated in real life.
Sera Lavelle, PhD, a clinical psychologist in New York City, adds that seeing so many faces in such a short amount of time is a modern phenomenon. Before social media, and even television, people saw maybe 100 faces in a day—usually the same ones in their neighborhood and all without any sort of beauty filter. Even as television led to growing celebrity influence on fashion and beauty, viewers could still tell those beauty standards weren’t necessarily achievable or even real. There was a stronger separation between everyday beauty standards and celebrity culture. But that started to change with the rise of reality television, and then later social media. Television was the first technology to bring beautiful strangers to life in our homes, and reality television made celebrity culture more accessible, but the latter has been associated with a decrease in body satisfaction.
Today, for people who have spent years on social media, Instagram face has become the new normal in their brains. While research falls short on estimating how many faces a person sees in a day in 2026, researchers estimated a decade ago that 95 million photos and videos were posted to Instagram each day. Considering that posts with faces in them receive more attention, and that Americans spend an average of four hours and 30 minutes on their phones each day, there has undoubtedly been a rise in exposure to so many faces (many of which look similar) in one digital ecosystem.
“Your mind is saying, ‘This is what the world looks like,’” Lavelle says. “We almost start to tune out the people around us, and we start to feel like the whole world looks like these people on social media.”
This could be one reason why plastic surgeons are seeing demand for facelifts in their 20s, and are reportedly being asked to recreate AI-generated faces on their human patients. But even cosmetic procedures aren’t guaranteed to quell the feeling that your face isn’t up to snuff. “The standard continues to shift because the image they are chasing may have never been fully attainable in the first place,” Emma says. “For many people, there is no finish line because the target itself is constantly changing.”
