This article is featured in Body+Soul and is republished with permission.
After years of filtered sameness, individuality is making a comeback – and challenging how we define beauty
For the better part of a decade, beauty felt … well, repetitive.
Scroll through social media and you’d see the same contoured cheekbones, the same pillowy lips, the same carefully curated “effortless” aesthetic.
It even earned a name: “iPhone face” – a look so uniform it felt almost templated.
But now, something is changing.
Looking different is becoming desirable again.
And while beauty standards haven’t disappeared, a shift towards individuality is creating a meaningful ripple effect, particularly among young people feeling less pressure to alter their appearance to fit a mould.
Why is originality making a comeback?
According to psychologist Emily Hanlon, the change has been building for some time.
“Over the past decade we have seen a meaningful shift away from the singular, highly polished beauty ideal that dominated the early social media era, toward something far more expansive and varied,” Emily explains.
“Where the mid-2010s gave us a fairly rigid template of what beauty was supposed to look like, we are now seeing beauty celebrated across a much wider range of bodies, features, skin tones and expressions of identity.”
The shift matters more than you might think.
“When young people can look around and see themselves reflected in the images they consume, the message they receive is that they are acceptable as they are,” Emily says.
“Our self-concept is built, in significant part, through social comparison, and when the comparison pool is culturally and ethnically diverse, the psychological outcome tends to be far healthier.”
Australian Psychological Society chief executive Dr Zena Burgess says perceptions of beauty are complex, shaped by a mix of cultural, individual and social influences.
“These so-called ‘beauty standards’ can influence a person’s self-esteem, self-concept and mental wellbeing,” Dr Burgess says.
She adds that how we interpret these standards shapes not only how we see others, but how we see ourselves – making more diverse, realistic representations of beauty psychologically powerful.
It also helps explain why the hyper-edited aesthetic of the 2010s is starting to lose its grip.
“There is genuinely encouraging evidence that younger generations are developing a more critical relationship with filtered and heavily edited content,” Emily says, noting that the “Instagram face” era is giving way to “rawer, less curated self-presentation”.
Have beauty standards really disappeared?
Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward.
Butterfly Foundation head of prevention Helen Bird says beauty standards haven’t disappeared – they’ve simply evolved.
"It’s difficult to say that beauty standards are becoming less uniform, but they are certainly just as powerful,” she says.
“Even if the beauty ideal is shifting … the message being heard is still the same: that your value is tied to how you look.”
And while social media can promote individuality, it can also reinforce insecurity.
"Butterfly’s BodyKind Youth Survey revealed that over half of young people aged 12-18 believe social media makes them feel dissatisfied with their body,” Helen says.
How can we break the cycle of appearance-based value?
Helen says breaking this cycle requires a reframing.
“It’s important we help shift the focus away from seeing our bodies as something to be viewed and evaluated,” Helen says.
This needs to be replaced with greater appreciation “for what our body enables us to do” and recognition of its “unique strengths and qualities, which have nothing to do with appearance”.
Emily says that while “looking unique” might be trending, the real win isn’t in swapping one aesthetic for another.
“It’s in loosening the grip of any single standard altogether,” she says.