When I tried the Inverted filter myself today, I was genuinely surprised by my horrified reaction to my own face. The most well-supported theory for this is that our species has evolved to recognize symmetry, if unconsciously, as a proxy for good genes and physical health.’ Kate Moss has long been described as having the 'perfect' face because of its proportions and symmetry and she's, you know, one of the most successful supermodels in existence. According to a report by Psychology Today, ‘The dominant scientific explanation for the attractiveness of facial symmetry is sometimes called “Evolutionary Advantage Theory.” If the grand choreography of developmental gene expression is perfectly executed, the result is perfect symmetry.Facial symmetry is universally associated with beauty and attractiveness in both sexes and in sexual and non-sexual contexts. Though of course asymmetrical faces are every bit as beautiful as symmetrical ones, over the years scientific research has suggested that we may inherently find symmetrical faces more attractive than asymmetrical ones for evolutionary reasons. The symmetrical face trend isn't actually anything new. And so the Inverted filter has a become a lowkey way for people with perfectly symmetrical faces to 'prove' their beauty. Not everyone is horrified: if you have a symmetrical face it barely shows a difference when you switch the effect on and off. A third person wrote: ‘Having a meltdown because I tried the Inverted Filter for the first time.’
‘Just stared at myself with the inverted filter on for too long now I’m gonna go cry ,’ said another. Like I’m genuinely disturbed at how much worse I look to other people than I already thought I did anyway why isn’t my face symmetrical… actually bothers me ,’ said one user. ‘Since being told the inverted filter on tik tok is how people really see you I can’t stop looking at it.
One response to this amongst the millions of users who have shared the effect on their accounts, is absolute horror. The trend in question uses the ‘Inverted’ filter, which shows you a flipped impression of your face - ie what everyone else sees when they look at you, the opposite of what you see reflected back at you in the mirror. Just when we thought there were no more aspects of our appearance left for us to feel insecure about, a new trend arrives on TikTok to prove to us that we are, in fact, very much mistaken.