High Definition Cameras Are Making Us Ugly

We’ve all had this experience: you get dressed, do your makeup and hair, and get a great review from the mirror, your husband, and your girlfriends.

But one little accidental slip of the finger and the front-facing camera exposes all your flaws.

You see every bump and wrinkle in your skin, every detail of your under-eye bags, the shape of your face looks jagged rather than soft.

Our immediate reaction is to think, Wow, I look way worse than I thought I did! What’s wrong with me?

But what if it's not you?

The problem when we look bad in pictures is not that we’re not as attractive as we thought when we looked in the mirror.

The problem is a form of technology that was created for many things, but not to enhance the natural beauty of its subject.

Photography can feel like it shows the full picture because it captures what is there, now with incredibly advanced technology.

In truth, this isn’t exactly what’s happening. This cold, impersonal form of capturing an image is simply a technical rendering. It's shaped by lens design, sensor resolution, lighting, software processing, and compression.

The result of your phone selfies is not how a person is experienced in the world.

It's only one possible interpretation of a subject, and this is why it’s so dangerous to treat how we show up on camera as an objective verdict of our appearance.

Today’s cameras, especially the ones in our phones, are designed to extract detail. They're built with ultra-high resolution sensors, aggressive sharpening algorithms, and HDR (high dynamic range) processing that lifts shadows and evens exposure. This combination reveals microscopic skin texture, fine lines, tiny variations in color, and subtle shadow transitions that the human eye does not isolate or analyze in real life.

The result of your phone selfies is not how a person is experienced in the world. It's how a surface appears under technical scrutiny.

Have you ever noticed how dreamy and beautiful women looked in older photographs? I’m not just talking about those iconic shots of Marilyn Monroe or Sofia Loren. I’m talking about regular, everyday black-and-white photographs taken with a far less advanced form of technology.

There’s a reason for this.

Older forms of photography were far, far simpler. Film grain blended texture naturally, lenses were much softer, the resolution was lower, and the light rolled off more gently. This retained the warmth and dimensionality, the personality, of a human subject. It was up to the photographer to make deliberate artistic decisions about exposure, contrast, and color temperature; that is, a human being interpreted the human subject to highlight and enhance her natural features.

Automatic phone cameras are completely missing this human aspect.

Have you ever wondered where the term “filter” comes from? In traditional photography, a filter was a literal piece of glass placed over the camera lens to shape how light entered the camera. Some reduced glare, some adjusted color temperature, and others softened harsh detail or added a gentle glow. These tools weren’t about hiding flaws. They were about helping the camera render a subject in a way that felt closer to how we experience people in real life. Cameras capture light mechanically; filters helped translate that light more humanely.

Modern imaging does the opposite of the old-school art form of photography. It automatically strips away softness, flattens subtle, natural gradients, and artificially sharpens every angle and line.

Modern imaging automatically strips away softness, flattens subtle, natural gradients, and artificially sharpens every angle and line.

It doesn’t interpret a person with a personal touch. Instead, it extracts cold, hard, impersonal data from her.

As Kayla M. Brooks, former runway model and longtime fitness coach, told me, “I’ve lived on multiple sides of this subject as a runway model, competitive fitness aesthetics athlete, and fitness and fat loss coach for 17 years. The older cameras and photography and videography skills played well with contrasting light, shadow, texture, exposure, and temperature much the same way that the female body also works: softly, cyclically, warmly, multi-dimensionally, graciously.”

“The modern high-def imaging we have now strips away this warmth and softness while harshly exposing what was never a flaw to begin with, and demanding women now correct aspects of ourselves that have been non-consensually exposed,” she continues.

Kayla works with women to honor their feminine cycle and biology in defiance of what she calls the “fitness hustle matrix” that teaches women to chase a fabricated distortion of female beauty standards. She names a striking parallel between the unrealistic body goals we chase and the lies modern cameras and hyper-edited media tell us about our own beauty.

“This hyper-visibility has warped our perceptions of beauty and applied pressure where we once enjoyed protection, fueling unrealistic expectations of female body standards, fitness trends, chronic dieting, cosmetic interventions, Photoshop and AI, and a kind of aesthetic anxiety we have normalized as ‘discipline’ thanks to the lens we’re now forced to see ourselves and each other through. The images did not simply get clearer or higher quality… it has become cruel.”

The use of the word “cruelty” is harsh, but in the same way that the mechanical cruelty of modern photography harshly distorts physical images of the human person by providing a visual analysis of our bodies and faces that human social perception never required.

Our pores, the natural asymmetries we may have, normal softness, and hormonal fluctuations in our complexion or figure were all once part of the living texture of our face. But with the impersonal light of modern imaging, they become problems to fix that we may have never noticed.

The real cruelty, however, is how constant modern photography has become in our lives.

As the technology has advanced to show every little flaw and create some that aren’t even visible to the naked eye, cameras have become something we all have access to at our fingertips at nearly every waking moment.

Women in the past were not burdened with a deluge of less-than-flattering photographs of themselves. They relied on the data provided by the looking glass and the look of warm affection in the eyes of their loved ones, and little else.

Human beauty is experienced through so much more than hyper-detailed pictures.

They were not closely studying their faces under harsh LED lights, through front-facing mirrors from an incredibly unflattering angle, or in horrifying self-checkout cameras that make everyone look like they’re fighting for their lives.

It’s impossible to overstate the radical nature of this drastic psychological shift away from a personal, “real-life” perception of one’s own beauty to a culture of chronic visual self-surveillance.

Consider the difference between snapping a quick selfie and sitting to paint a portrait. A painting is carefully labored over by a conscientious artist who is intent on capturing not only the appearance but the internal light of his subject. A skilled painter interprets light, intentionally chooses emphasis, and captures the mood, we can even say, the soul, of his subject.

A good photographer can do the same and can capture the vitality, the personality, the presence, the humanity of her subject. But this is a skill, one we don’t have merely by virtue of having 24/7 access to highly advanced cameras.

Human beauty is experienced through so much more than hyper-detailed pictures.

The problem is not that women suddenly became uglier. The problem is that we started believing the machine.