Social Media Is Making it Harder to Remember What We Look Like

14.08.2026, 20:47 allure.com

For many, the age of social media has turned us into blurry-eyed, doom-scrolling hobbyists. From anxiety to disrupted sleep to negative thoughts about how we look, social media’s impact on how we feel about ourselves is well documented. Now, a new study suggests it’s also making us forget what we look like.

Published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, 95 people—Millennial and Gen Z men and women, all of whom had a history of using Instagram for an average of eight years—underwent a virtual reality experience called body illusions. Researchers hypothesized that prolonged Instagram use and “exposure to idealized, homogenized appearance-focused content” would make it harder for an individual to tell this difference between their own face and that of a stranger’s.

In one part of the experiment, a person wearing a virtual reality headset watched a stranger’s face being brushed on the cheek while feeling that same stroke on their own cheek for 120 seconds. The only similarity between the person participating in the experiment and the stranger was gender—the stranger’s face was not a doppelgänger. After the experiment, participants took a survey in which they had to say how much they agreed with statements like “Sometimes, I felt like virtual face was my face” and “Sometimes, I was not aware that my physical face was different from the virtual face.” Based on the results of that survey, researchers found that the more years a person reported spending on Instagram, the more likely that person was to view the stranger’s face as their own.

It feels like a more dystopian progression of the age of facial conformity. “When you're online for so long, when you’re exposed to these beauty standards so much, you don't feel this sense of uniqueness that’s your own characteristic,” says Maria Sansoni, PhD, lead author of the study and postdoctoral research fellow at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy. The lines between what you look like and what other people look like start to blur.

Notably, those who had a history of using beauty filters for years were more likely to feel a sense of agency over a stranger’s entire body in another part of the study. The study was small, but the results suggest that the memory our brains and bodies have of what makes us unique is pretty pliable. “It’s so plastic, so malleable that you can confound yourself with another person that you have never seen,” Sansoni says. Years of exposure to the same beauty standards on Instagram could slowly break down how our brains recognize our own faces. It does feel like every scroll through social media feeds shows the same features on similar faces from different accounts, from the mandatorily smooth forehead to glass-like skin to thick eyebrows to plumper-than-usual lips.

This apparent inability to distinguish ourselves from a stranger is just another piece of the body dysmorphia pie social media has served up. Francesca Emma, LMHC, a psychotherapist in New York who was not involved in the study, tells Allure repeated exposure to the same beauty look on social media isn’t just an “aesthetic pattern,” it’s a “psychological one.”

“The more frequently someone is exposed to the same body type, facial features, skin texture, or overall appearance ideal, the more the brain can begin to register that image as the ‘default’ way someone is supposed to look,” Emma says.

Over time, anything outside of that can feel abnormal and unfamiliar. When you don’t look like everyone else on social media, feelings of being “different” or “not enough,” may arise, Emma says. But the issue is not seeing an attractive person. “It is the meaning our brain attaches to that comparison,” Emma says. “It becomes the belief that ‘if I do not look like this, something is wrong with me.’” What makes this moment particularly challenging, Emma adds, is that it’s hard for people to distinguish what’s real and what’s not real on social media. Since people can apply filters and use AI to edit photos of themselves, much of our modern standard of beauty is a look that can’t actually be replicated in real life.

Sera Lavelle, PhD, a clinical psychologist in New York City, adds that seeing so many faces in such a short amount of time is a modern phenomenon. Before social media, and even television, people saw maybe 100 faces in a day—usually the same ones in their neighborhood and all without any sort of beauty filter. Even as television led to growing celebrity influence on fashion and beauty, viewers could still tell those beauty standards weren’t necessarily achievable or even real. There was a stronger separation between everyday beauty standards and celebrity culture. But that started to change with the rise of reality television, and then later social media. Television was the first technology to bring beautiful strangers to life in our homes, and reality television made celebrity culture more accessible, but the latter has been associated with a decrease in body satisfaction.

Today, for people who have spent years on social media, Instagram face has become the new normal in their brains. While research falls short on estimating how many faces a person sees in a day in 2026, researchers estimated a decade ago that 95 million photos and videos were posted to Instagram each day. Considering that posts with faces in them receive more attention, and that Americans spend an average of four hours and 30 minutes on their phones each day, there has undoubtedly been a rise in exposure to so many faces (many of which look similar) in one digital ecosystem.

“Your mind is saying, ‘This is what the world looks like,’” Lavelle says. “We almost start to tune out the people around us, and we start to feel like the whole world looks like these people on social media.”

This could be one reason why plastic surgeons are seeing demand for facelifts in their 20s, and are reportedly being asked to recreate AI-generated faces on their human patients. But even cosmetic procedures aren’t guaranteed to quell the feeling that your face isn’t up to snuff. “The standard continues to shift because the image they are chasing may have never been fully attainable in the first place,” Emma says. “For many people, there is no finish line because the target itself is constantly changing.”

While it might feel like the only way to escape this cycle of conformity is to sign off forever, Emma disagrees. The goal isn’t to eliminate social media, Emma says, but rather to make more of an effort to question the images we consume and to build more diverse and realistic social media feeds.

“Reducing time spent in isolation while increasing connection, and reconnecting with our bodies can all be protective factors for mental health,” Emma says. This can be as simple as getting off your phone for a few minutes, and perhaps calling in help from the Brick app or just putting the device in a separate room. The goal should be to reduce the time you’re spending on your phone in small increments. When you feel the urge to mindlessly scroll, Emma adds, call or text a friend instead. And at lunch or dinnertime—which can be a prime time to scroll—try to make plans to eat a meal with a friend. “Isolation gives more room for body image and negative thoughts to get stronger,” she says.

It’s not just about not avoiding isolation; it’s also about reconnecting with your physical body. To do this, Emma recommends taking a walk without your phone and using your five senses to notice your environment. When you take a shower, notice the sensation of water on your body. You can also practice “box breathing,” which is when you inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds, exhale for four seconds and hold your breath for the same period before repeating.

Sansoni, the lead author of the study, agrees that getting back into your body is essential, as the research is a reminder for people to sharpen their “inner body signals,” which is information from within the body—like a person’s heartbeat—that helps the brain construct its sense of self.

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