Snapchat adds 'Purple Rain' geofilter to honor Prince
That didn’t take long. Soon after news broke that Prince died at the age of 57 on Thursday, Snapchat rolled out a “Purple Rain”-inspired geofilter to honor the legendary artist.
Snapchat users can now add a filter with an image of purple rain drops on top of photos taken within the popular social app. Unlike lenses that scan your face to add, say, dog ears or laser eyes to pictures, geofilters are added after a photo is taken by swiping left.
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The move comes after the “Purple Rain” singer died at his private studio compound after battling the flu for several weeks. The official cause of death is not yet known.
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In addition to the Snapchat geofilter, the app has a “We Love Prince” story that users can contribute to throughout the day.
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Snapchat’s efforts follow yesterday’s controversial Bob Marley lens to celebrate April 20, known as 420 (or a holiday for those who enjoy marijuana). While the filter added a signature Bob Marley hat and dreadlocks, it also made the user’s skin tone darker -- a feature many called “digital blackface.”
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Samantha Murphy Kelly was the Deputy Tech Editor for Mashable, where she covered lifestyle tech and entertainment. She joined the Mashable team in 2011 and was based in New York.Samantha is regularly featured on national TV broadcasts -- including Fox, Fox Business, CNBC, the BBC and HuffPost Live -- contributes to radio segments (NPR, Wall Street Journal Radio) and has served as a panelist and moderator at conferences.Before joining Mashable, Samantha covered the tech industry as a senior writer for TechNewsDaily and wrote stories for sister publications LiveScience.com and Laptop Magazine. Her stories have been syndicated to various sites including CNN, Yahoo! News, MSNBC, ABC News, Fox News and CBS News. She also spent five years at a retail trade magazine writing about social media and technology, worked at ABC News in the Brian Ross investigative unit and got her start in journalism at CourtTV.com, where she reported on high-profile court cases. She’s a graduate of New York University with a degree in journalism.Samantha has taught English in Thailand, climbed Mt. Fuji in Japan and has a thing for pizza.
