Standardized beauty homogenized facial features by blending ethnic influences.

Evidence

Global standardization wasn’t confined to spaces or objects; it also reshaped bodies. The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino coined the phrase “Instagram face” to describe the homogenized visage proliferating across social media: “a young face…with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones…catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes…a small, neat nose and full, lush lips.” The look was the beauty equivalent of the omnivore monoculture; makeup artist Colby Smith described it as “an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 650

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines ‘Instagram face’ as the bodily manifestation of the omnivore monoculture — the era’s sampler-platter approach applied to human physiognomy.
• XREF: Strongly connects to Marx’s core thesis: the omnivore monoculture as a mélange of everything, where variety itself becomes the single uniform style.

Related

• Globalized beauty standards now blend features from every ethnicity into one hybrid face (similarity 0.92)
• Shared techniques render the world’s face identical for everyone (similarity 0.81)