Recently, almost everyone I know became fascinated with those Instagram filters that show what you’d look like with a lot of plastic surgery—like, a lot. It surely faces recognition developers’ finest hour: tricking our eyes into seeing features we know so well morph into something quite different, something grotesque or, depending very much on the filter in question, something kind of enticing. It’s a disorienting visual experience not unlike another time-wasting fix of mine: staring at before and after celebrity plastic surgery photos.

Countless social media accounts dedicate themselves to this pursuit of facial posterity. Once you stare at these split screens enough, famous faces start to swim before your eyes, appearing as disembodied features; as pert, proportional shapes that have come to rest on a smoothly foundation-ed canvas, like a glamorous Mr. Potato Head. A little dehumanizing, perhaps? Definitely, especially when you start to play spot the procedure—one up-and-comer after another displaying the telltale signs of a brow lift, rhinoplasty, buccal fat removal, blepharoplasty. Cat ladies and dysmorphia aside, the traditional narrative around plastic surgery is that it should make you look like “you but better,” but once you view a bunch of celebrity afters en masse, it starts to look like a formula.

There are some disturbingly overfilled and overpulled examples (recently, Demi Moore and Zac Efron come to mind) but most are fairly subtle and undeniably conventionally attractive, from the obvious (Bella Hadid) to the somewhat unexpected (Anya Taylor-Joy, Margot Robbie, Dua Lipa). Quickly, you realize that almost every actor or pop star or model you see on a screen has been altered in some way.

“The reason why I started this account was that I wanted to expose the truth,” says the founder of @_celebrities_before_after_, whom I reached out to via DM. “People, especially young girls, believe that everything they see is real, while actually, it’s Photoshop and plastic surgery. I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that we should never compare ourselves to celebrities who can afford anything to make their looks perfect.”

A 26-year-old student from Hungary, who declines to be identified, started the @_celebrities_before_after_  account in March 2020 and has amassed 142,000 followers. It’s the only account of this type that I actually follow, partly because the images are presented for consideration so neutrally, without censure. “I’m not judging people who get a lot of work done, but I do believe that everyone is beautiful in their own way and accepting ourselves is always a better solution than getting plastic surgeries. When it comes to buying totally new faces and bodies, I don’t like that.”

Still, some of the people featured on the account have certainly felt attacked—perhaps because their professional opportunities are often based on their appearance, and they would prefer it appear effortless. “Twilight Star Nikki Reed asked me to apologize and delete her photos from my page. And [Victoria’s Secret model] Candice Swanepoel blocked me after I tagged her.” Celebrity fans are another source of objection. “I get many hate messages and comments under my posts,” says @_celebrities_before_after_. “They usually tell me that I’m insecure, miserable, ugly… I think a lot of fans can’t accept the fact that their favourite celebrity had work done. So they deny it, or attack me, and it makes them feel better.”