Gen Z Is Experiencing Instagram Face Fatigue

When we created a video on celebrities who all shared unique features in the early 2000s, it blew up all over TikTok.

It’s no surprise at all. I think we're all tired of the same faces, the nonstop Disney reboots, the political noise that blares from every screen. We seek novelty; we’re desperate for something new and different. But I’ll spare you the full spiral, because this piece is about the face. Specifically, the one we all know by now: the Instagram face.

Our screens, thanks to Instagram, reality television (Love Island being the top culprit), and influencer culture, are increasingly filled with faces sculpted by tweakments and plastic surgeries: lip filler, Botox, buccal fat removal, rhinoplasties, deep-plane facelifts, etcetera. The result is that many women now look like a Bratz doll or, in some selfies, AI. It’s as if they went to the medspa or plastic surgeon and used the same reference photo. That’s not to say none are beautiful – whenever I visit Miami or L.A., I’m stunned by the sheer number of gorgeous women I see. I can’t deny that a lot of them are beautiful and appear picture-perfect, but I (like a lot of other people) am tired of how common that IG look has become. It’s everywhere, it looks unnatural, and now that we know they all got the same things done, the wow factor is gone.

The point is, there’s an overexposure of this artificial small-nosed, big-lipped baddie aesthetic, and everyone is experiencing fatigue.

The Rise of Instagram Face

In my opinion, Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner helped usher in the era of “Instagram Face” in the mid-2010s. They looked perfect with their plump lips, ultra-high cheekbones, and zero wrinkles. That was around the time when Instagram was at its peak. Along with the Kardashians and Jenners came copies of IG models that snowballed into a new beauty standard that thrived in square, high-resolution frames. Then came the rise of Snapchat. But when the filters weren’t enough, women began asking plastic surgeons for the filtered versions of themselves. As social media boomed, everyone wanted to look “camera-ready,” which often meant looking like someone entirely different.

But the new, enhanced face wasn’t made for real life; it was made for photos. This is why some celebrities look off on video but great in images. I've also noticed that some actresses can’t lift their eyebrows during emotional scenes. The Instagram face has flattened character, texture, and expression in favor of something frozen – ironically, the same way they look in selfies.

This is why Aimee Lou Wood was loved by so many when White Lotus aired this year. The British actress showed us so many facial expressions, completely unrestricted by Botox. She didn’t get veneers either, and yet her smile lit up every scene. It was truly refreshing to watch a pretty face that could actually move.

Celebrities are also starting to speak out on the IG face. In 2024, Kirsten Dunst went viral for saying, “I still know to this day, I'm not gonna screw up my face and look like a freak. I'd rather get old and do good roles.”  Freak might sound harsh to some, but it's not hard to understand what she meant when everyone’s starting to look the same (or botched). We’re moving into uncanny valley territory trying to attain the perfect look.

Are Natural Faces Trending Again?

In January 2024, a woman named Courtney Ball posted a TikTok that influenced many others to show their “real” face. Her video, captioned, “here is a reminder what the raw face of a 28 yr old girl who hasn't had any ‘work’ done looks like,” racked up over 8 million views. Her face had visible pores, lines, and movement. Women in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s began following suit, posting their own untouched faces to remind the internet what real skin looks like. Some had freckles, others had wrinkles, pigmentation, acne scars, and subtle asymmetries. More than anything, they had character and individuality.

Why did these videos go so viral? I believe it’s because we no longer remember what real skin and features looked like. It’s no wonder that a generation that grew up seeing every pore smoothed out and every feature edited is now asking to see what real faces look like again, to see big noses, small lips, or the way emotion registers on an unaltered brow. 

Some modeling agencies have already begun to pivot from DEI, slowly gravitating back toward women with less altered features like they've always done. Not necessarily as a rejection of beauty standards or anything, but as a recognition that beauty can’t be standardized at all.

You get the point: It seems natural beauty is in demand. But while the backlash against Instagram Face spreads, the cosmetic procedure industry is bigger than ever. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, interest in aesthetic work remained steady through 2024, despite economic uncertainty. The demand is actually increasing. Young women are getting preventative Botox and fillers or going under the knife.

So, on one side of the internet, women are dissolving filler, showing their bare faces, and celebrating their natural features. On the other hand, 20-somethings are getting lip flips just to look better in selfies. These trends are happening at the same time, but the more common tweakments become, the more tired people seem to feel. There must be a breaking point somewhere. Given the growing exhaustion with the Instagram face, I think it's not far-fetched to say that women will begin to get de-influenced from tweakments and surgeries.

We’re not going to wake up one morning and collectively reject tweakments or plastic surgery, but I think we’re starting to ask better questions. Why do we feel the need to erase the things that make us recognizable? Why do we only feel confident when we’ve sculpted ourselves into something unrecognizable? And what would it feel like to let ourselves be seen, fully and without edits, exactly as we are?

Lately, I’ve been trying to ask myself those questions more often. I’ve stopped letting the plastic surgeons on TikTok convince me that I need to change my face. I’ve reminded myself that I’m beautiful in my own way. I don’t have dramatic features – I have round, chubby cheeks, normal lips – and that’s okay. That’s what makes me look like me. I look like my mother, and I love her, and she’s beautiful. When we stop judging beauty on such a surface level – when we see a face for what it carries, where it came from, who it resembles, or how it expresses sadness and joy, how human it is – we stop being numb to the other facets of beauty that exist. Suddenly, beauty is no longer just one look. And I think that's what matters. 

It’s my personal belief that we see other women’s faces more than we see our own, especially for Gen Z, who grew up online. The next step isn’t deleting social media, or it’s just standing in front of the mirror a little longer each day, not to critique or compare, but to get familiar with the face we’ve been given – and to learn how to love it.