Séamas O'Reilly: TikTok's Teen filter is the past, staring back at us

"...the most stirring responses are those from those who don’t just recognise the child staring back at them, but miss them dearly; the act of seeing their youthful sense triggering a flood of memories..."

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

The first one I saw featured a split screen. At the bottom, a man in his 40s with handsome, weathered features; above him a strikingly attractive teenager, smooth-skinned and clear-eyed. Both are discussing the age-changing video effect they are using, and how it’s making people “my age” lose their minds. They are talking in unison because they are, of course, the same person. As filters go, it’s so well-tooled that it takes me a few seconds to clarify which of them is real, and whether this particular filter ages you up or down. Then our dual-aged user says “and now my timeline is full of middle-aged folks trying to understand where their life went… it’s quite emotional”. As I begin to scroll, I find that he’s not exaggerating.

Before we get to the more interesting psychological ructions caused by Teenage Look™, let’s first discuss how well it works. We’ve seen the progress of aging/de-aging effects progress fairly rapidly over the past few years. Amid some very mild panics about whether these products were harvesting our faces for facial recognition purposes, it seems as we all stowed such concerns quite quickly, since everyone with a smartphone has turned a static image of themselves into a baby or an old geezer at some point in the last few years. You don’t even have to have a current-gen smartphone — as my 10-month old baby and her 75-year old grandad can attest, since I’ve done several for both. Teenage Look deploys the same mechanic, but with real-time video and, it would appear, a much more sophisticated process.