Bored Panda reached out to Erin Alyssa Vogel, a social psychologist and senior research associate at the University of Southern California. Her researches involve adolescent e-cigarette use, social media and digital health, and tobacco use disparities in the LGBTQ+ community.

“Influencers are under a lot of pressure to make themselves and their lives look perfect. Most people who use social media try to portray themselves in a positive light, by posting about good things that happen to them and posting their favorite photos of themselves,” Erin explained.

However, for influencers, the pressure to look perfect is even more pronounced, she said. “Their appearance is part of their brand. Face tunes and filters can help them achieve the perfect look. I wouldn't say face tunes and filters are 'addictive,' per se.”

“But when people get used to seeing only filtered photos of themselves, they may start to really dislike their natural appearance, and continue to use filters,” she added.

It’s no secret that the addictive face filters, heavy photo editing and other appearance enhancements that are so popular these days on social media often do more harm than good. “Filters help create and enforce unrealistic beauty standards,” Erin stated and added that “For many years, we've been exposed to airbrushed and highly edited photos of models and celebrities.”

“Now, with social media, we see filtered photos of our peers too. It's easy to forget that the other person's appearance is not actually flawless. We may compare our real appearance to other people's filtered appearances and feel worse about ourselves as a result. Also, if we only see filtered photos of ourselves, our natural appearance in photos may start to look strange and wrong to us.”

We also spoke to Helen Egger MD, a child psychiatrist and co-founder and Chief Medical and Chief Scientific Officer of Little Otter. “We’ve always had the challenge of images being filtered and doctored to make unrealistic measures for what beauty looks like,” she said. But filters on social media take it to the next level, “because it's not just seeing an image of a celebrity who is unrealistic and measuring yourself against that person, it’s measuring your real self against a pretend image of yourself.”

According to Helen, “Edited images receive positive reinforcement from likes and comments, which serve as a dopamine hit. You like the feeling and want to do it again, which feeds on itself.” Meanwhile, “Face filters use algorithms to reinforce a certain standard of beauty that is very narrow. It doesn’t support individuality, it supports conformity with what’s the standard of beauty, which is worrisome.”

“In some cases, this can turn into body dysmorphic disorder, in which you are convinced some aspect of your body isn’t good enough. It becomes a fixation, an obsessive worry that often leads to anxiety, social isolation, eating disorders and seeking out cosmetic surgery,” the child psychiatrist concluded.