If you search #makeup on Instagram, 88,388,486 posts immediately appear and most of posts show off their fantastic makeup skills. But because this social platform is highly concentrated on image – you cannot just post words on this social media and have to post picture with it – a specific style of makeup become massive on social media posts. And that new ‘Insta-beauty trend’ seems bit exaggerated for dramatic effect. you probably cannot scroll down without seeing heavily drawn ‘on fleek’ eyebrows, long and extravagant false eyelashes, sharp contouring like Kardashian sisters and a heavy, matte liquid lipstick. 

But does this trend effect on people’s self esteem especially teenage girls?

The answer is sadly yes. and it hits their confidence really really hard.

BBC reports girls in the UK are markedly less confident about their looks than they were five years ago, research by Girlguiding suggests. Just 61% of 1,627 seven- to 21-year-old girls polled for the 2016 Girls attitude survey felt happy about their bodies, down from 73% in 2011.

61% of girls answer they are in pressure to look perfect and obtain intense and unlikely achievable body goal. More than half, 66% of teenage girls even answered they feel they are not pretty enough and even worse.

But why is it serious? You might think every teenage girls have insecurity around that time and it is pretty normal to compare themselves to other people. However, if you’ve seen 93% of girls on research, almost every girls on this research, said women are more judged by appearance than ability, you would feel something is going wrong.

For some people, social media platform work great for them to show their talent and skill to become popular. And once you become popular, you obtain many people’s love and attention like celebrities. For celebrities, this new media is good to show their luxury life without looking obvious to show off and even sometimes they’ve got good reputation somehow because people think seeing their private like looks like celebrities try to communicate with fans.

Well, but for most of girls, that luxury life and fantastic makeup skills is another standard of beauty they need to achieve and goal to keep chasing. Teenage girls may feel pressured to look a certain way that may not be healthy. And that cause serious problem of depression. They downgrades their value and kill their uniqueness. Even they got 100 other points to bright themselves, they try to get rid of all that good things and chase only one standard made on media.

Also, social media is compounding the problem. Teenage girls are constantly posting pictures of themselves to try and get as many “likes” as they can on social media, and feel bad about themselves if they don’t get as many as they want. That vicious cycle seems hard to be end.

Then what should we do? 

What? so should we banned all the beauty guru on social media or teach they are fake and hiding themselves behind of makeup? Or even do we need to stop using makeup? What do we do? What’s the right answer?

I think there is no right and wrong when it comes to beauty. Whether you are wearing heavy make up or barely even put any make up on, it is important to society embarrass their own identity and refer that as ‘Beauty.’ If we stat having negativity about make up and people enjoy doing that on social media, it will be another form of discrimination and making standard. So accepting various characters and respect their own individuality will help teenage girls love themselves.