We know that Hollywood is not representative of the broader population and that its standards of beauty are Eurocentric and very narrow. People like me (I’m a dark-skinned South Asian woman who wears a hijab) are rarely represented in the celebrity world. One reason for this is simply because we are considered too “other” and therefore visually unattractive.
To be honest, that’s fine with me – I don’t need to be represented by Hollywood – but there needs to be a discussion here about whose faces are normalized and whose faces are not.
I decided to try out some celebrity lookalike filters on TikTok to see if technology has probably come a long way since my teenage years.
The results were interesting. We didn’t actually get Dev Patel or Zayn Malik, but we did get a token POC. Zendaya looks nothing alike, other than their skin tone being vaguely similar. It doesn’t matter if you are a South Asian woman! Another filter malfunctioned and couldn’t find any matches.
But all the other popular filters I tried only assigned me male celebrities. This may seem harmless to you, but it’s actually quite expensive.
Image: Attached.
