I deleted Instagram for two months and forgot what was wrong with my face

I deleted Instagram because I worried it was getting into my writing, and over the next two months, I discovered it had already got much further into my head than I had realised.

This was not, initially, an experiment in self-esteem or any of the other things people usually discover after deleting Instagram and subsequently feel obliged to tell you about. I had become slightly suspicious of my own sentences. I would sit down to write and find that a thought had arrived already dressed in somebody else’s language. I wanted to know what my mind sounded like with fewer people talking over it, so I deleted the app in July and expected, at most, to become a little more interesting on paper.

A few weeks later, I realised I was looking at my face differently. Not dramatically differently. My skin hadn't cleared up, and my features hadn't rearranged themselves overnight. I still had the same slightly uneven eyebrows, the same face that looks perfectly agreeable in some light and faintly accusatory in others. What had changed was that I was seeing it less.

I had never realised how often I was looking at other people’s faces. There were beautiful women everywhere: in bathrooms, kitchens, cars, gyms, bedrooms, airport lounges, restaurants, on beaches, usually looking as though they had just happened to find themselves in exactly the right light.

Alongside them came a certain vocabulary of beauty that changed so gradually it was hard to notice. Skin became luminous, then almost wet; cheekbones became sharper, then softer; lips became fuller, then somehow more natural-looking. Hair was arranged to look as though it had not been arranged. Makeup became increasingly difficult to identify, though the work required to make it appear absent seemed to increase in proportion. I had simply become very good at recognising a certain kind of beauty and, somewhere along the way, equally good at recognising when my own face was falling short of it.

I knew my good side long before I knew that I knew it. I knew which photographs could be rescued by cropping, which expressions made my eyes disappear, which kind of smile I could get away with when someone else was holding the camera and which one I should never voluntarily produce for posterity. I knew that some mirrors were kind, some were not, and that there was a particular sort of overhead lighting under which almost everyone becomes a little more philosophical about their relationship with food. It never occurred to me that I had learned it.

When I was younger, photographs funnily arrived after the fact. Someone took one, everyone carried on, and by the time you saw it you were already remembering the day rather than thinking about the photograph. You had been there; that was more or less the point.

A photograph now arrives almost at the same time as the moment itself. You’re at dinner, someone takes a picture, and suddenly everyone is looking at the screen, deciding which one feels most like the evening. I think that tiny pause has changed something. We’ve become accustomed to seeing ourselves from the outside while we’re still inside the moment. Instagram simply made the habit continuous.

The strange thing about seeing so many beautiful faces every day is that you don’t necessarily begin to think you are ugly. You develop opinions. You begin to understand your own face in the language of the image. You are asking how successfully you have translated into a photograph. That distinction is small enough to go unnoticed.

Without Instagram, I began noticing it everywhere.

I would get dressed without wondering whether the outfit would photograph well. I would sit somewhere with beautiful light and enjoy the light without immediately imagining what it would do to my face. I took fewer photographs, and the ones I did take stopped acquiring the strange importance they once had.

The two months were mostly like that. I did not become free from beauty standards. I still enjoyed makeup, clothes, good hair, good skin, and the particular pleasure of looking in the mirror after getting ready and thinking, yes, this is working. 

If I had come away believing that beauty was a silly thing I had been tricked into caring about, the whole thing would have been much easier to dismiss. I don’t think beauty is silly. I like the transformation, the theatre, and the ridiculous amount of attention that can make an otherwise ordinary Tuesday feel faintly special. 

What unsettled me was how little distance there was between noticing beauty and measuring yourself against it.

You can start by looking at beautiful faces because they are beautiful, and eventually find yourself describing your own face with the same vocabulary. You notice the things you once admired in other people, only now you are looking for evidence of them in yourself.

When Instagram came back onto my phone, I did not become immune. Within days, I was looking at beautiful women again, saving things I liked, taking photographs, and noticing skin, hair, clothes, and faces. I could not honestly say that two months had cured me of anything, because there was nothing to cure.

I had discovered a difference between caring about how I looked and continually checking how I looked. I think about that difference more than I expected to. For those two months, I had a face and, for long stretches of the day, nothing to say about it.

In the first few days after I downloaded Instagram again, I caught myself doing it almost immediately: opening the front camera for no particular reason, checking my face, closing it, and opening it again a few minutes later. And yet, every once in a while, I still have one of those moments when I catch my reflection somewhere unexpectedly—in a dark shop window, in the mirror of a lift, in the glass of a car—and there is a fraction of a second before the inspection begins in which I see myself without knowing what I am supposed to see.

It is such a small thing that I almost miss it. Then I usually fix my hair.

Lead image credit: Pexels 

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