I regarded my face on my iPhone screen. It didn’t look like my face. After applying the infamous Body Glamour filter on TikTok, my skin was smooth and liberally daubed with perfect make up — the sort of make up you have seen a thousand times on more expert examples of the female species than I. My nose was a little slimmer, lips fuller, and my eyes were brighter and bluer.

I looked great. I wondered if I could learn to do make up that well. I wondered if my lips were a bit too thin in real life. Disoriented, I switched back to my own image on my phone. I’d never looked so plain and dull-eyed. I switched again to the picture of the pretty woman. I wanted to look like her. I wanted to be her. If her face was so well put together, maybe her life was, too?

In Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, the young, handsome protagonist sells his soul to remain young and beautiful forever. Instead, his portrait ages and becomes hideously ugly with each immoral act.

Modern-day filters do the opposite. Our bodies and faces inevitably give away our habits and hedonism, whilst our social media portraits can hide a multitude of sins with a filter. You can be sweaty from a run, bleary-eyed with a hangover, just a plain old Jane, but a filter transforms you into youthful, glossy, homogenised perfection — or a chimeric cute half-kitten, half-person. Whatever you like really. There is a filter for it.

A century ago, a commissioned portrait or self-portrait would have taken hours or days, requiring costly materials and some talent. These days you can take a burst of ten photographs per second on a smartphone and slap a filter on. People have always indulged in self-flattery and propaganda, but today’s options are accessible and at scale. In our efforts to present the most sparkling version of ourselves for personal, social and professional reasons, we have become consummate propagandists. You could even say we have become liars.

From breast implants to nose jobs, liposuction to Botox, cosmetic surgery has become popular as an increasingly affordable and accessible way to bring to life our vision of ourselves. Once inspired by adulation of movie stars and adverts, now we are inspired by our own falsified narcissistic selfies.

Selfies, detached from reality, can become a source of anxiety

“Snapchat dysmorphia” describes when someone wants to look like their social media selfie. The term was coined by cosmetic surgeon Dr Esho. Incredibly, the filters on our phones are setting the tone and pace of cosmetic surgery. Before social media, his prospective clients would want to look like the stars they saw in magazines and on TV. Then social media changed everything. It gave people the ability to edit themselves using filters. The angle of the smartphone camera added the first degree of distortion, different to a mirror. Then filters and apps added an additional layer of unreality. It has changed people’s expectations of how they want to look and created unrealistic expectations of cosmetic surgery. “People ask for their pores to be removed,” he said. “That is not possible in real life. In images it’s because of makeup and filters. Sometimes it shocks people I can’t remove pores. People don’t know what’s real anymore. They want bigger eyes, smaller noses, a sharper jaw and cheekbones, arched brows. We can do some of that, but not all of it.”

Selfies, detached from reality, can become a source of anxiety. Social media fuels body dysmorphia. Whilst this might seem to hit the young hardest, I think it’s a problem for us all, and it’s only going to get worse. I’m a fifty year old photoshop-wielding feminist who gives talks on body image, and my filtered selfie made me feel discontented within seconds.

It could be worse, though. I craved fuller lips and perfect eye liner. What if your filtered self is an animal, and you yearn for sharp canine teeth or fur? There are 343,000 members of the furry subreddit. These are people who like to fantasise about being “furries”, anthropomorphised animals. For most, their “fursona” is limited to a digitalised avatar or artwork, but some have costumes. A rare few have gone on to have extensive body modification surgery, such as Dennis Avner, otherwise known as “Stalking Cat”, and Erik Sprague, the “Lizardman”.

Augmented and virtual reality technologies will allow us to create immersive, interactive worlds that increasingly blur the lines between the real and the virtual. We will be able to explore new worlds, experience new sensations and even create new identities. Furries will probably be at the vanguard of the Metaverse. These experiences will raise important questions about what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. Are we becoming more detached from our physical bodies and, if so, what are the consequences of this detachment?

Transgenderism is the obvious example of the ultimate disconnect between the idea of self and actual bodily self. Hormones and surgery are used to transform the body into an imagined gendered self that has often been reinforced in the digital world on forums, through transition videos and the dogmatic policing of pronouns and Big Tech platform policies.

There are other examples of the body being contorted to match an idea of the self. Hymenoplasty is a ghastly procedure, designed to “repair” the hymen and restore the semblance of virginity. Although this is normally a procedure used by ultra-orthodox religious communities, the Brazilian social media influencer Júlia Medeiros has had hymen reconstruction because she regrets the way she lost her virginity to a man who deceived her — he failed to deliver on the marriage and children. She wants the “fairytale” and for her “special moment” to be “unique”. Of course, it can’t be, because for something to be unique, it must be single, solitary, never to be repeated. She wants an act of surgery to overwrite her real experience. In fact, her simulacrum of a hymen is the fairytale.

An Australian porn star with the rare condition uterus didelphys — a double uterus and two vaginas — has also created a fictional double life for her body. She reserves one vagina for work and one for her husband, saying it “doesn’t feel like cheating”. Her vaginas are the repository for the experience, not her mind or heart, as she literally compartmentalises her infidelity.

The human body is now a work of fantasy and science fiction

Near-billionaire Bryan Johnson does not want to get old and die, so he is trying to reboot his body with an assortment of anti-aging treatments. The lead doctor of this bizarre expensive project, Oliver Zolman MD, wants to be the first to prove that patients have reached “longevity escape velocity” and reverse ageing in the organs. As much as this is supposed to be a scientific exercise, it conjures magical thinking. Johnson’s penchant for snorting vials of stem cells is reminiscent of the Countess Elizabeth Báthoryde Ecsed, who was supposed to have bathed in the blood of virgins to stay youthful. Pale (he avoids sunlight) and lean with dyed hair, he does have a little of the vampire about him.

Once upon a time, we settled for the fact that we are born baby smooth, must age, fall ill, become decrepit and eventually die. We don’t settle so easily these days. If the human body used to be a canvas of historical record, it is now a work of fantasy and science fiction, written as much in the electronic ether as in the flesh. People at the fringes of bodily transformation aren’t just weird outliers; they are canaries in the coalmine.

Even if you don’t apply a filter, you might choose the best of several photos to share. You probably share the highs but not the lows of day to day life on your socials. We filter our faces, our personalities, achievements, experiences and truth. We separate, compartmentalise, embellish and even fictionalise. If we don’t expect the complete truth from ourselves, why would we expect it from other people or organisations? In other words, we lie, and we risk becoming more tolerant of lies. We are the ultimate propagandists.

In an inversion of Dorian Gray, our selfies are pretty, but our psyches distort. The self has been replaced by the selfie.

Laura Dodsworth’s Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it will be published by Harper Collins on 20 July 2023