The TikTok 'bold glamour' filter is going viral for its wildly unrealistic beauty standard
Lots of filters online are designed to zhuzh up your look. But a filter going viral on TikTok is different. It basically overhauls your entire face and it's leaving people worried.
The "bold glamour" filter basically makes you a different person. It sharpens your chin, fills in your eyebrows, smooths your skin, brightens your cheeks — hell, it might even improve your credit score, who knows. It's a wildly effective filter — it can be difficult to decipher that it's a filter at all. Folks immediately pointed out the danger of such a filter.
Imagine the beauty standards it would set. People don't want to live in a world where everyone has to airbrush out anything perceived as an imperfection.
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What makes the bold glamour filter especially concerning is it is seamless. You can move your face, put your hands in front of the filter, do whatever — and the filter remains on. That means people might not be able to immediately realize you're using a filter in your TikTok. Back in the day, a filter was something silly like dog ears or Disney-fied eyes. Now the tech has come far enough where it's basically reshaping and contouring your appearance in real time. That is frightening, especially for young folks on TikTok trying to grapple with beauty standards.
People on TikTok wrote that the filter should come with a warning and that it was basically face tuning, but just a filter. They're not wrong. It smooths out any blemishes, it plumps your lips, whitens your teeth, while all still plausibly looking like it's still you. The skin even seems to retain some texture while using the filter, basically hiding the fact that it's smoothed.
The bold glamour filter is frighteningly effective. Should we let it, it creates an impossible and off-putting standard for anyone living a normal life. Already, there are tons of TikToks tutorials promising make-up to copy the filter IRL. That feels like a dangerous precedent to set.
The bold glamour filter is out there. And, remember, nobody can — or should aspire to — look like that filter in real life.
How to get the 'bold glamour' TikTok filter
Should you want to see what the filter looks like, you can pull it up pretty much like any other filter on TikTok. All you do is click the plus button in the app. From there you can click effects on the bottom left corner, search and choose the bold glamour effect, and see what you look like with the filter. Just be forewarned, TikTok is not real life.
Topics TikTok
Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).
