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.

At its best, it is truly uncanny, the “teen” version almost unmistakeable from a living, breathing person. Having spent a week watching every one I can find, I quickly begin wondering what it is that makes someone “look” younger in the first place. The skin is clearer, sure, but have they also whitened your eyes and tucked the chin? Smushed your nose and plumped your lips? For the first time in a while, you notice those smile lines by your mouth — within minutes you discover they are called nasolabial folds — only because they have been removed and deposited you, effortlessly, to the land of Tír na nÓg. Is that, you think to yourself, all that aging is?

Scrolling through hundreds of examples, there are less-successful efforts to be found, featuring overexposed contrast or smudgy resolution. Many feature beards, glasses, and piercings getting lost in flesh, appearing and reappearing as they move their phone, like a Cronenberg movie filmed over Zoom. There are questions from darker-skinned users wondering, with some justification, why one repeating effect appears to be the lightening of their skin. And others — many, many others — who say that the person in the box above them, though plausibly lifelike, simply looks nothing like they did as a teenager.

Inarguably the most stirring responses, however, 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, be they traumatic, wistful, life-affirming or deeply painful. Some begin addressing their youthful doppelganger directly, offering wisdom, support, or consolation with the knowledge of what’s happened in the intervening decades. Quite a few say nothing at all, choosing instead to weep silently into camera. 

It’s easy to be cynical about some of these reactions. This is a Tiktok filter, after all, not a therapeutic device, and people are knowingly sharing them online with maudlin music, so one must take the trend with a pinch of salt. But there are so many, and of such variety, that it’s clear this filter has tapped into a certain emotional yearning among people that’s fascinating to observe.

When I finally tried it myself, I didn’t feel a huge emotional effect. It’s likely that, at 37, I’m a bit too young for it to impact me as much as those above. Sadly, this is not because my face has avoided the ravages of time — though I would very much like you to make that assumption — but because, like most people my age, I was documenting that face quite regularly in my teens, and sharing them in easily accessible internet portals, from Bebo to Myspace to Facebook. They are not a few dozen pictures stowed in some dusty shoebox or plastic-wrapped album, but hundreds, even thousands of snapshots which have followed me online, seen with a little more regularity than a seldom-visited tranche of mementos, brought out at Christmas or trips home.

I’m also in the happy, but boring, position of not having had a particularly traumatic, or indeed blissful, time as a teenager, and thus don’t feel any great pangs of longing to return to, or repress, those days. 

I do remember tedium intermittently punctuated with bright, hot flashes of embarrassment; the horror of having unjustifiably strong opinions at the same time as I had unjustifiably weak internet connections; never having any money and being only slightly less terrified of girls not talking to me, as I was of girls talking to me. But mostly I remember being a contentedly bookish nerd who played a lot of football and spent most of my free time on the internet. If I were to make a solemn appeal to my 14-year-old self it would likely not include any particularly sage advice. It would probably be something like “please stop downloading South Park audio clips, you have a shared internet connection and it’s costing your dad a fortune”.

None of which discounts the occasional, even accidental, power of Tiktok’s Teen filter. Watching hundreds of people from a slightly older generation having profound responses to their younger selves is often bewildering, but sometimes genuinely moving. We all have a tendency, perhaps even a need, to gaze into the past. It’s just that now, it can stare right back.