TED Talks Daily
How digital culture is reshaping our faces and bodies | Elise Hu (re-release)
09 Sep 2025
As "beauty filters" proliferate on social media platforms like TikTok, journalist Elise Hu says we've entered the era of the technological gaze, where the digital world shapes real-world beauty standards. She explains how to navigate this new reality in all its forms — and why you should reject the idea that your appearance dictates your worth.This episode originally aired on January 27, 2025.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. The talk I'm sharing today is very important to me because it's something I care about a lot. Beauty standards in our new technological age and the ways digital culture is reshaping our faces and bodies.
What does it mean when we so often see ourselves through the lens of our phones or computers? What if the way we look in the real world somehow feels less real or doesn't live up to the image we have of ourselves online? It's not just the topic that means a lot. I also cherish this talk because I gave it. As you may know, the talks I share with you on this show don't happen just anywhere.
They happen at our TED conferences. And I gave this TED talk you're about to hear last year at the inaugural TED Next conference. which is TED's newest annual flagship conference dedicated to exploring the future you, from the personal to the professional and everything in between.
TED Next caters to an audience that's really hungry for innovation and fresh ideas, and I really loved being on the ground in Atlanta where it takes place. It pulses with a fizzy energy, and the conference has all the elements of the well-thought-out and executed programming that we expect from TED.
I'm so, so excited to share with you that I will have the honor of hosting a session of talks at TED Next 2025, which is coming soon on November 9th through 11th in Atlanta, Georgia. I helped curate the talks for this session that I'm talking about and we have really dynamic speakers and artists that y'all are going to love and could really shift the way you think.
It's not too late to join me there in Atlanta at TED Next to see these talks happen live. If you want to learn more about attending, which I hope you do, go to TED.com slash daily next. That's TED.com slash daily next. I hope to see you there. And now here's my talk. Earlier this year, I was in Taipei, Taiwan, where I decided I wanted to make a TikTok about Cup Noodle.
Only this brilliant TikTok never happened because of the shock I got when I opened up the app and flipped it into selfie mode. The face looking back at me was a face? But not exactly my face. A whole array of beauty filters had automatically worked me over, and I could not turn them off. There was so much going on here.
Skin smoothing, skin lightening, teeth whitening, nose narrowing, bigger eyes. And it gave me a thinner, softer jawline. This was a whole lot of nonconsensual filtering, or what someone joked was forced catfishing. And for me, it's the perfect example of something called the technological gaze at work. What is it? Well, women have had to play to the male gaze forever, you know what that is.
But the technological gaze describes an algorithmically driven perspective that we learn to internalize, perform for and optimize for. And then by taking in all our data, the machines learn to perform us in an endless feedback loop. We learn it so young. An estimated 80 percent of 13-year-old girls in America have already used filters or some kind of editing to alter their appearance online.
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