Is Your Face Too Aesthetic For Your Feed?

The faces are gone, the captions are lowercase poetry, and every photo has been edited to look like it fell out of a magazine on social media these days. And the thing is, we’re all in on it.

Everyone’s feed looks like it belongs in an art gallery nobody asked for. “Candids” are really plandids, “effortless” is code for three hours of retakes, and even the blurry photos are perfectly blurry. Instagram used to be a diary. Now it’s a museum of selective memory.

In 2016, Instagram was chaos, but the good kind. Converse shots, selfies with the dog filter, and that one friend who wouldn’t stop lip-syncing Selena Gomez on Dubsmash. My grid looked like a scrapbook I’d be embarrassed to show my grandkids, but at least it felt like me. 

According to a 2024 Internet and Mobile Association of India report, 68 per cent of Indians between 18 and 25 admit they feel pressure to make their posts look “perfect,” and a third delete posts if they don’t match their “vibe.” Read it as a translation for: we’d rather erase ourselves than ruin the aesthetic of row three, column two.

What's even funnier is that the moment someone does post something personal, an anniversary, a graduation, a shoutout to their parents, someone somewhere calls it “cringe.” But is it really? Celebrating your life, your people, your tiny wins? Not cringe. If anything, it’s the most authentic thing you’ll put out there.

The irony is, the only places people allow themselves to be unfiltered now are spam accounts made for five close friends, where the real personality finally comes out. Your main feed is for the world, but your spam is for your soul. 

I’m not pretending to be innocent here. I’ve rejected perfectly good photos of my face because the background didn’t “go” with the last two posts. Once, I spent an hour trying to find the exact 15-second song clip that said “cool but not trying too hard” for a story I knew would expire in 24 hours. Spoiler: I failed, and the story still looked manufactured. 

So yeah, sameness is the disease. Scroll long enough and it feels like everyone is using the same Lightroom preset, shopping from the same Zara rack, and writing captions like they’ve swallowed a Rupi Kaur poem. But what’s the cure? One would say:

Post a selfie without the filters. Your pores are fine, I promise. Upload the photo you’d normally hide. The half-eaten Maggi, the badly lit mirror snap, the one where your eyeliner betrayed you. Embrace the awkward. Blink mid-shot? Keep it. Weird angle? Even better. Half your head cropped out? Iconic. 

Confess in your captions. Not everything needs to read like a Pinterest quote. Try: “Didn’t shower today but my hair looks mysteriously clean.” Way more relatable. 

Go feral on Stories. Your playlist, your pet snoring, your WiFi dying mid-Zoom—it’s all content or overshare the mundane. Your grocery haul, your desk at 11 PM, the autorickshaw that almost killed you: these are the real highlights. 

The last time I ignored my inner “social media manager brain” and posted something un-curated, it was just a picture of my t-shirt that said, “ready to retire”. People replied more to that than to any of my carefully curated posts. Which says a lot. Honesty gets more engagement than the fifth picture of you fake-laughing at brunch. Who knew? 

Because, what’s the point of having a grid that looks like it belongs to a generic influencer if people can’t even tell it’s yours? 

Also a proposition, let Instagram be messy again. Post your chaos. Post your cringe. Post your face. Your feed isn’t the Louvre, it’s an app where people once thought it was cute to stick virtual puppy ears on their heads. And if your aesthetic takes a hit, who cares?