The celebrity look-alike makeup trend is everywhere. Here’s why it’s a problem.

Hollywood is hardly representative of the general population, and we know that its beauty standards are Eurocentric and extremely narrow. People like me (I’m a South Asian, brown-skinned woman who wears a hijab) are barely represented in the celebrity world, and that’s partly because we’re just too “different” and therefore seen as unattractive.

Honestly, I’m fine with that – I don’t really need Hollywood to represent me – but there’s a conversation to be had here about whose faces are normalized and whose aren’t.

I decided to try out some celebrity look-alike filters on TikTok to see if maybe technology has made a lot of progress since I was a teenager.

The results were interesting – while I didn’t get Dev Patel or Zayn Malik, I did get my one-token POC: Zendaya, who I look nothing like, aside from having a vague skin tone. Not even a South Asian woman! Another filter just failed and couldn’t find a match for me at all.

However, every other popular filter I’ve tried assigned me only male celebrities – which might seem harmless to you, but is actually pretty comprehensive.

Image: delivered.