ABSTRACT. The objective of this paper is to systematically review unattainable fashionable beauty ideals integrating virtual accessories of face-perfecting filters. The findings and analyses highlight that digital self-tracking devices and beauty apps articulate idealized facial images, body ideal internalization, and sociocultural pressures. Throughout May 2022, I performed a quantitative literature review of the Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest databases, with search terms including “beauty apps and filters in visual digital cultures” + “perceived sociocultural pressures,” “self-rated emotional expressiveness,” and “image processing algorithms.” As I inspected research published between 2017 and 2022, only 166 articles satisfied the eligibility criteria. By removing controversial findings, outcomes unsubstantiated by replication, too imprecise material, or having similar titles, I decided upon 32, generally empirical, sources. Data visualization tools: Dimensions (bibliometric mapping) and VOSviewer (layout algorithms). Reporting quality assessment tool: PRISMA. Methodological quality assessment tools include: AXIS, Dedoose, MMAT, and SRDR.

Keywords: beauty app and filter; visual digital culture; perceived sociocultural pressure; self-rated emotional expressiveness; image processing algorithm

How to cite: Newell, M. (2022). “Beauty Apps and Filters in Visual Digital Cultures: Perceived Sociocultural Pressures, Self-Rated Emotional Expressiveness, and Image Processing Algorithms,” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 12(2): 144–159. doi: 10.22381/JRGS12220229.

Received 27 June 2022 • Received in revised form 22 December 2022
Accepted 25 December 2022 • Available online 30 December 2022