“I’m just trying to give them what they want, if they want to be mad,” Flowers tells Vogue. “If I notice a trend that seems like a little bit of rage bait and I’m in the mood that day, I’ll do it.” She knows she doesn’t look her best in that video: “I was hungover, I had my hair all messed up. I was like, whatever, we’re going to do it.” She’d seen enough mean comments on other people’s videos that she expected them on her own. “What’s that they say? All press is good press?” she asks. It worked: Her viral video gained her 10K followers in one day.
While Flowers says that TikTok at large has a culture of “people just being really nasty and rude,” she adds that her usual videos demonstrating makeup techniques, generally get a kinder reaction. “There are women supporting women on there, and a lot of people are asking for makeup tutorials,” she says. A few days after going viral, Flowers posted a new video talking about the experience while doing her beauty routine. The comments are full of women praising her bone structure, her freckles, and her glowing skin.
Does this TikTok filter actually show what you’ll look like as you age? Dermatologists say no, not really. “It is obviously very difficult to predict how one will age using only a video from one time frame,” says Dr. Dara Spearman, a board-certified dermatologist and owner of Radiant Dermatology in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “It does not take into account genetics, nor does it consider environmental factors such as sun exposure or smoke (cigarette, cigar, or marijuana) exposure. Finally, it doesn’t factor in interventions such as skincare or procedures. Given this, the filter is unlikely to be very accurate.”
But we already knew this trend isn’t going viral because of its scientific accuracy—it’s going viral because it’s fun to be mean on the internet, and in our beauty- and youth-obsessed society, an easy way to be mean is to tell a woman she looks old. “When we think of social media impacting culture, we now have a trend where people are really like, Oh, let me critique if you’re aging well. It reinforces a society that’s already doing that,” says Moraya Seeger DeGeare, MA, LMFT, co-founder of BFF Therapy in New York and Chief Clinical Strategist of fintech company Calibrate. “We’re literally saying, I know nothing else about this person, so let’s talk about how you look.”