Our Face and our Digital Entities

If you flipped through a beauty magazine 15 years ago, you would have seen pages riddled with models wearing shiny lip glosses and various bright eye shadows.  Although thankfully this style is no longer popularized,  beauty trends today have evolved into the vastly more complex.  From strobing to baking to stacked false eyelashes to #eyebrowsonfleek, the way we put on our makeup has evolved faster than ever. There is one huge societal transformation that can be attributed to this marked change.

Social Media.

We are taking pictures and sharing them at rates that haven’t been seen in modern human history. In fact, Instagram, one of the largest social media applications sees approximately 80 million uploads per day. Although posts will vary from a variety of categories, the #selfie category sees 1 million posts per day from the age 18-24 demographic.

These statistics show that we not only are we networking and sharing more than ever, we are obsessed with ourselves! We’ve become a society addicted to likes and self-affirmation almost to our detriment. In fact, in 2015 more people died from taking a #selfie than shark attacks!

It’s no wonder the makeup trends that we are seeing today are professional caliber; what would have been seen only on celebrities or a makeup artist a decade prior has become the new expectation.

The likes you receive digitally via sites like Facebook and Instagram are often our biggest source of social currency for much of Millennials and Generation Z.

Where do we go from as a society from here?

Marketing Lesson for a business aiming to increase it’s social media presence is to keep in mind the societal changes that are ongoing with the onslaught of social media the selfie. Beauty standards have changed and a good  way to stand out is to go against the grain.