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#nofilter.

In Cape Town, this is usually employed on social media when one is sharing a picture of a sunset, or a sunrise, or something along those lines.

Nature is so inherently beautiful that there is no reason to use any editing tools to enhance it, after all.

Be sure to throw in a line about how Cape Town ‘is showing off’ and life is #notkak.

When it comes to posting selfies, it’s a different story, and filters are very much the order of the day.

Consider two recent stories that are worth a read – Huff Post’s ‘Selfies, Surgeries And Self-Loathing: Inside The Facetune Epidemic’, and Cosmo’s ‘You Realize That TikTok’s Inverted Filter Is Designed to Destroy Our Self-Esteem, Right?’

Here’s a quote from the Huff Post article:

Cosmetic surgeons who spoke to HuffPost said they now regularly have patients come in with photos of themselves that have been so heavily Facetuned they would be anatomically impossible to replicate: jaws so slim teeth would need to be pulled, facial structures so warped eyeballs would need to be repositioned…

…they’re saying, ‘Do whatever you need to do to make me look like this.’ And it’s like, ‘Great, let me crack open your head, take out your teeth and reposition your bones.’”

Both those articles above highlight what has been dubbed a body dysmorphia epidemic, and it’s been a long time coming.

In a recent segment from The Daily Show, Trevor Noah touched on the issue of how more and more teens are going under the knife, in order to try and replicate what these filters can do.

Not to sound like an old person totally out of touch with ‘the youth’, but this is not going to end well at all:

[sources:huffpost&youtube]