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The Bridge: As if there weren’t enough going on in the biotech-sphere (with all the cloning and whatnot), appearances may become more deceiving as technology and beauty industries continue to merge. From startling surgeries to digital modeling agencies, we’ve got the recent round-up for you.
He’s All Legs 🦵🦿
Starting off with the most objectively weird thing we’ve read this week, GQ’s article on the male beauty trend of limb lengthening.
NGL (not gonna lie) we’re shocked.
The procedure, while completely unnecessary, is pretty hardcore and “manly”. First you pay your doctor about $75,000 dollars to break your leg (💀) and insert giant metal screws in the part you want to grow, then you adjust those screws – painfully stretching your bones – for a few months. If all goes well: Ta-Da!
You’re three inches taller… 🧍♂️
Thankfully, most patients are happy with their results. Personally, this is a bit too extreme of a beauty trend for us. For those that want even longer legs, there’s always the Metaverse.
Face Card
Have you heard of the “Zoom Boom”, the pandemic-driven rise in cosmetic surgery 🤕? Well it’s evolved into something a little less human. Filtered and photoshopped images have been a thing for a while now, especially on social media, but avid Instagram and Snapchat users want those effects in real life.
Filters make our faces more symmetrical and that boosts the engagement on our profiles (algorithms favor symmetry). Our guess is that surgery-aged filter fans, and their younger counterparts, look forward to going under the knife to have their real world engagement match the one of their “perfect” digital self.
We can’t blame them, who doesn’t want the perfect selfie 🤳 without the filters? There is some stiff competition though, as AI avatars are becoming more lifelike – and beautiful.
Case-in-point, the 3D cartoon avatars we’ve come to know and love are receiving a digital facelift. Nvidia, an AI company, launched its Avatar Cloud Engine to enable easier and faster releases of avatars for its Omniverse and metaverse applications. These avatars are hyperreal, blurring the lines between human and 🤖 even more – they even fooled us.
They’re also interactive, making them a cost effective alternative to surgery – especially for those who don’t mind integrating more of their online life into their regular one.
But it doesn’t 🛑 here…
There’s already a modeling agency, Photogenics, that exclusively represents 🤖 avatars. Outside of this being something straight out of Orwell’s 1984, it also signals a growing change from supermodels (humans) or influencers (edited-humans) being the beauty standard.
Digital avatars can be perfectly symmetrical, blemishless, and truly represent an unattainable beauty – because humans have flaws. As trends and standards increasingly become set by algorithms and CGI masterminds, we’re left wondering if/how Gen Z will incorporate this unreal perfection into their counterculture beauty movements based on acceptance and inclusivity.
Like all things Z-llennial and under, it’s sure to be a wild ride 🎢.
