The invention of camera dates back to 1816, popularity of instant camera took off in 1965 and till date it is taking the world by storm. Today, almost everyone has camera on theirs phone all the time and is using its features to the max. Millennials are expected to take 25,000 selfies in their lifetime. With new invention comes new changes, new manipulation which tends  misuses the invention for their own benefit. These days people are using images for everything, for example, political campaigns, clothing lines, Ads, protest etc because images has the capacity and the platform to reach millions of people around the world with the help of the internet. So images can manipulate a lot of things in anyone’s life and it’s free. Recently, I was on “TikTok” which is like “ Vines”, where they act with some music in background and sometimes notes on the pictures. So there was a trend recently on the app “ Tik Tok” where people put black paint on their face with sad music in the background. The next second, it changes to fun music , the same person is shown with full makeup and of course without the black paint. This context with few images switching from black paint fact to full glowing makeup shows how the world sees fair skin as more attractive and how melanin is not considered beautiful. This trend showcased bad society’s mentality where if you don’t meet society’s standard of beauty then you are not attractive. This trend made me feel so bad and I have seen a lot of people from India keeping up with this trend. Coming from India, I know how melanin is not considered the most attractive skin color and pale skin can win over darker skin color. Which is sad but it’s true in most rural India. It is so sad that the trend is spreading all the wrong message through the use of images and it is even more sad that this has became a trend on that app. 

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.